


Blank Cards and Infinite Stakes

by Zingiber



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Genderfluid Character, Hints of Abusive Relationship (Not A/C), Ineffable Bureaucracy (Good Omens), Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, One Word Prompts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2020-03-20 13:42:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 35,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18993778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zingiber/pseuds/Zingiber
Summary: Fifty short stories based on randomly-generated word prompts. Mostly Ineffable Husbands silliness and fluff.  Rating subject to change.





	1. Chubby

**Author's Note:**

> This series is based off of 50 randomly-generated word prompts. Ideally, it will update every other day, but that may change due to Real Life reasons. Each chapter acts as a standalone unless I specify otherwise, and chapters may vary between the book and the TV show.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley observes Aziraphale as he changes over time.

It takes Crowley a few millennia to admit it to himself, but once he has, he can’t stop thinking it:  watching Aziraphale’s mortal corporation grow chubby as the decades slide by is diverting. 

At first, he puts it down to Adversarial caution.  It would be a daft demon who ignored their natural enemy’s weaknesses, after all.  Best to always be on one’s toes, always looking for a chink in their armor, _et cetera._ It’s covert observation.  A cousin to lurking, if you will. 

The Nile had carved its way through Egypt since The Beginning, but the term _denial is not just a river in Egypt_ had not yet been invented.  Crowley couldn’t fathom how deeply he was sunk in it _._

The first time he notices, he’s just been knocked down after one of his and Aziraphale’s customary bouts.  Stalks of wheat crumple as he sprawls in the dirt, pain shooting through him in a dozen different places.  He struggles to rise, then stills as the point of Aziraphale’s blade kisses his throat. 

“Woah,” Crowley stammers, raising his hands.  He is acutely aware of the hairsbreadth between the blade and his messy discorporation. “Easy there, angel.”

Aziraphale considers him for a moment of silence.  Then he sighs and lowers the blade.  “Crowley.  It’s been… how long has it been?”

“Decades,” Crowley says.  He sits up and miracles the dirt off his tunic.  “You look well.”

Aziraphale narrows his eyes.  Clearly he’s picked up on sarcasm in the last century, and is trying to unearth the hidden barb in Crowley’s words.  When he can’t find it, he sheaths the sword and holds out a hand.  “You’re losing your edge, Adversary.”

Crowley grabs the proffered hand, and really, he can’t help himself – the words are out before he can catch them.  “So are you.”

A frown.  “But I won.”

“So you did.”

Aziraphale releases his hand.  “If you’re trying to deceive me, it won’t work.  I know you, you old serpent.”

“So you do,” Crowley says, because all his tongue is capable of forming is iterations of the same bloody sentence.  His attention has been well and truly ensnared.  Something about Aziraphale is… different.  Softer.  The edges are smoothed down, the hollows filled in.  He is still perfect in the sense that all angels are perfect, but he is no longer perfectly _bland._  He looks… comfortable. 

Crowley squashes a sudden urge to revert to his old shape, to slither up the angel’s arm and bask on the warm, pliant nape of his neck.  He crosses his arms, fingernails biting into woolen sleeves. “I see you’ve found a new sword.”

Aziraphale looks flustered before mustering a prim, purse-lipped mask.  “Yes, well.  After the, er, kerfuffle with the flaming sword, I had to have a… a little chat with Gabriel.”  He looks like he’s swallowed tea brewed in a waste pit.  “Anyway, they decided I was best suited to thwart your wiles, so.” He pats the hilt of his sword.  “Here I am.”

“And more of you than ever,” Crowley says.

“And what, pray tell, is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing at all.  I’m only appreciating the corpulent corporation with which my Heavenly counterpart comports himself.”

_“What—”_

But Crowley, whose preoccupation with Aziraphale’sbody is rapidly outstripping his wits, has had enough of banter.  Their Adversarial enmity has long since faded into something blurred, wet ink on parchment – something you must squint at to read.  Nevertheless, Crowley doesn’t like taking chances.  You can never be sure who’s watching, and besides, best to keep the angel on his toes.

Crowley miracles a thin, dark blade into his hand and swings it at Aziraphale, leaving plenty of time for the angel to draw his sword and block.  They don’t speak much after that.

As the decades slide into centuries, Crowley keeps an eye on the angel’s changing form.  A cozy layer of fat swathes the once-sculpted ridges of muscle.  The bronze gleam of Heaven’s light fades from his skin, replaced by the pallor of shadowy corners in ancient libraries.  Lean, strong fingers grow soft and plump.

And, because Crowley is a demon, it seems only natural to wile the angel into indulgence.  In Nod, he feeds Aziraphale dates and figs and once, daringly, the sweetest apple he can coax from the trees.  In Gomorrah, he plies the angel with fermented date palm cocktails sprinkled with nutmeg and crushed lemongrass.  In Paris in 1793, he watches in delight as Aziraphale mops up tomato sauce with chunks of baguette, leaving no crumb untouched.  In the back room of Aziraphale's bookshop, he swallows down his Chateau Lafite and tries not to gawk as the angel licks a stray drop of wine from the rim of his glass. 

After the world almost ends, the angel and the demon are sitting at their customary table in the Ritz.  Crowley has evicted the previous guests, more out of a force of habit than any desire to mess people about.  He hopes Adam Young understands.

Sitting across from Aziraphale, watching with the intent, unblinking focus of a serpent, Crowley thinks he is only just beginning to understand it: Aziraphale’s plump, partridge-soft body is much more than a mere diversion.  Crowley stares down at the untouched swirl of chocolate mousse before him.

“Angel.”

“Hmm?” Aziraphale blinks and lowers his spoonful of soufflé.  “My dear, what is it?”

Crowley dunks his spoon in the mousse.  He lifts the offering, eyebrows raised. 

Aziraphale understands, of course.  You can’t spend six-thousand years with a person – an angel, a demon, _anyone_ – without learning every corner of their mind, every chink in their armor.  Crowley could laugh at himself.

Instead, he can only watch, spellbound, as Aziraphale leans across the small space.  His hand shakes.  The angel licks his lips and smiles. 


	2. Willing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale considers the bounds of bodies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line Aziraphale remembers is taken directly from the book.

When it comes to angels and demons, the term _“the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”_ is more of a guideline than an actual rule.

Oh, it’s an enforced guideline, to be sure.  If angels and demons were running rampant across the Earth showing off their parlor tricks – heads spinning ‘round, spines contorting into improbable shapes, wings, all that rot – the humans would go crazed with terror.  It would be pandemonium.   

But, like every guideline, this one can be stretched to fit new boundaries. Aziraphale has noticed this particularly with other angels, which rather ruffles his feathers if he’s being honest with himself.  There’s the Metatron, who, when he deigns to wear a mortal corporation, opts for the golden-haired, long-lashed, androgynous model that never fails to make humans stop and stare.  And then there’s Gabriel, who walks about in a corporation with a jaw like a cinder block and the body of a Hollywood action hero. 

Really, it isn’t Aziraphale’s place to judge, but sometimes he suspects the sin of pride has slithered into the upper echelons of Heaven.  He must take that up with Crowley sometime. 

Aziraphale is scrupulously neutral with his body’s appearance.  No gleaming hair or bulging muscles for him, thank you very much.  He had those, once upon a time.  He doesn’t miss them.

The body that _does_ preoccupy Aziraphale is currently sprawled on the battered leather sofa in the back room of his bookshop, sunglasses askew, spread-eagled and senseless to the world.  Seated at his desk with a rare manuscript before him, the angel counts Crowley’s breaths as his chest rises and falls, rises and falls. The endless, steadfast tempo of a metronome. 

They’ve both changed since Eden, he thinks, but Crowley has fundamentally stayed the same.  He has the same sinuous form, the same serpentine eyes, the same spark of goodness that so tantalized Eve.  Tantalized Aziraphale too, even if he does shy away from the mere thought of it. 

 _The spirit is willing,_ he thinks, _but the flesh is weak._  

Humans covet and struggle and fight until they run up against the walls of their physical limits.  What does it mean when the spirit is eternal and the bodies might be cast off, exchanged one after another for six-thousand years?  What does it mean when one spirit can know another for millennia and bodies are a mere – _cherished, beloved_ – afterthought? 

Aziraphale pushes back his chair and stands.  He crosses over to the sofa and kneels, studying Crowley.  A demon, a being who needs neither sleep nor breath. Sunk so deeply in slumber he has begun to snore.  Aziraphale delicately removes the sunglasses and sets them on the arm of the sofa. 

Crowley wakes with startling suddenness.  His eyes open, pupils thinning to slits.  He yawns and licks his lips, and Aziraphale catches himself memorizing the image, cataloguing it.  Filing it away. 

“Wassit,” Crowley mumbles.  He gives Aziraphale a bleary look.  “What century is it?”

“The same one,” Aziraphale assures him. 

“What’d you wake me for,” the demon says, more whine than question. 

An impulse to temptation seizes Aziraphale, makes his fingers curl with the desire to hold, his mouth water with the desire to taste.  He thinks Eve might have felt this way too, so long ago. A fragment of a memory floats through his mind, a conversation he was meant to forget.  An ineffable, infernal idea. 

_Maybe it’s all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it.  You, me, him, everything._

“Nothing much,” says Aziraphale. 

He gives into an impulse as simple and unnatural as breathing and leans forward. His lips are clumsy on Crowley’s brow, more a smear than a kiss.  The demon sucks in a breath and Aziraphale draws back.  Crowley looks shocked, but not upset.  In fact, he’s beginning to look quite pleased.

“Go back to sleep,” Aziraphale says.  “I’ll keep a while longer.”

Crowley snags his hand before he can slip away.  He is wide awake now, eyes amber-bright.  “Are you joking, angel?  I’ve only been waiting for this for—”  He cuts himself off with a grimace.  “Er.  For a while.”

“Well,” Aziraphale says tartly, “I suppose I had to take the initiative.  It figures.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You _are_ a demon,” Aziraphale reminds him.  “And you are _you._ Of course you would get stuck between sloth and…”  _Lust,_ he doesn’t say.  _And love._  

Crowley scoffs.  “Right. And you’re a paragon of hard work.”

“If you’d like to return to your nap for a few decades, that could be arranged…”

“Nah.”  Crowley runs his thumb over the angel’s knuckles.  He grins.  “Wouldn’t miss this for the world.”


	3. Sack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley witness the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to Wikipedia, Principalities are charged with taking care of cultures and people. This is why Sandalphon jokes that Aziraphale is a shit Principality.
> 
> Also, sorry for the sudden angst!

On the day Sodom and Gomorrah are sacked, Aziraphale is doing his good deeds in the nearby village of Zoar.  He has no notion of the imminent fire and brimstone – Above had been rather cagey since the hullabaloo with the flaming sword – until he spots Sandalphon and Michael at the local well, changing cups of water into wine and generally looking very pleased with themselves. 

Aziraphale’s first instinct is to slink away, and that impulse catches him by surprise.  These are his colleagues, his—his _friends,_ surely.  His fellow angels.  He should be welcoming them to Zoar with a warm embrace, should offer them a tour around the grand menagerie that is God’s creation.  He is something of an expert, after all. 

Instead, Aziraphale hesitates.  Just last night, he and Crowley shared date palm cocktails in a tavern in Gomorrah. He can still remember the zing of lemongrass on his tongue.  If he gets caught up with Michael and Sandalphon, surely there will be questions, questions he will be obligated to answer honestly—

“Ho, there!”  Michael’s sonorous voice is a rumble in the earth, cascading aftershocks of dread.  “Aziraphale!  How goes it, old friend?”

Inwardly cringing, Aziraphale plasters on a smile and walks across the village square, suddenly emptied of all passers-by.  He presses his hands together, keenly aware of the creases of dirt in his palms, the dark crescents beneath his fingernails.  “Michael.  Sandalphon. So good to see you.”

The Prince of the Heavenly Host raises her cup.  “Have a drink with us.”

“Oh,” says Aziraphale, who cannot remember the last time he turned down a cup of wine – though, admittedly, his drinking company has been decidedly less angelic than this.  “I really can’t, I’ve got, ah, very important—”

He pauses as a clay cup appears in his hand, full to the brim with blood-dark wine.  “Oh. How kind.  Thank you.”

“Think nothing of it,” Michael says with a broad grin.  “Sandalphon and I are just getting ready to sort out Sodom and Gomorrah.  Aren’t we, soldier?”

She turns to Sandalphon, who regards her with the blank, open-mouthed expression Aziraphale has secretly grown to detest in the archangel.  In his experience, Sandalphon has always oscillated between supercilious condescension and creepy vacancy. 

Also, he has the most irritating tendency to smack his lips when he eats. 

“Indeed, yes,” Sandalphon says after several moments, smacking his lips. Aziraphale feels his smile grow brittle. “Herself has decreed that, as punishment for their sins, the cities are to perish in fire and brimstone.”

A cold, vast gulf opens behind Aziraphale’s ribs.  “What?”

“Oh, yes,” says Michael gleefully.  She tosses back the last gulp of her wine and vanishes the clay cup with a flick of her wrist.  “A holy smiting of the greatest order.  I tell you, I’ve been waiting for something like this.  When the Almighty sent the flood, last time, I thought, why not let us have a little fun?  It would be just like the Rebellion.”  A wistful sigh.  “At least we’ll have a role this time.  Although I can’t say I expect the humans will be much sport.”

“I—I see,” Aziraphale says, voice small.  He stares at the cup in his hand, takes a cautious sip.  The taste of bile and bloodshed fills his mouth.  “And… what, pray tell, is their great sin?  Why are they being punished?”

Michael gives him a stern look.  “That is not for us to question, Aziraphale.”

“The Almighty has decreed it,” Sandalphon adds.  He takes a swig of wine and smacks his lips.  “It must be done.”

“Yes—yes,” Aziraphale mumbles.  “Of course. How silly of me.”

“If it’s the righteous humans you’re worried about,” Michael says, “fear not. There aren’t any.  We looked.”

“You did?”

“Oh, yes,” Michael says, with the smile of one sharing an inside joke.  “We were _very_ thorough.  Weren’t we, Sandalphon?”

Sandalphon looks as if he hasn’t registered the question for several seconds. Then he nods.  “We supped with Abraham’s get.  Lot.”

“Oh, yes,” says Michael.  “Thank the Almighty for Lot.  And his two virgin daughters.”

Aziraphale boggles at them.  Surely they haven’t.  “What?”

“All the men of Sodom came to the door, keen to _know us._ ”  Michael wrinkles her nose and shudders.  “Disgusting humans.  Lot offered them his daughters instead.”

“Very hospitable,” Sandalphon smacks. 

“How kind,” Aziraphale says, the disgust for what he is hearing a distant echo beside the horror clamoring for dominance of his mind.  _Where is Crowley?_ He was in Gomorrah last night.  Has he stayed there?  Has he moved to Sodom?  Or has he left the plains entirely?  _Please, let him have left._ “Well, it sounds like… like you’ve got everything under control, I suppose.”  He sets the cup down on the lip of the well with a trembling hand.  A sense of obligation halts him – the sense that you should offer to do something you really, really don’t want to do.  “Unless you need…?”

Michael’s eyes widen.  She laughs. “What, you?  Help us?  No, we have it sorted.  Besides, smiting cities isn’t exactly in your job description, is it?  A Principality like you?”

“Some Principality,” Sandalphon deadpans. 

Aziraphale bristles, stung, but the terror clawing at his insides bids him hold his tongue.  “Yes. Right.  Jolly good.”  He turns, already hurrying out of the square.  “Happy, er, smiting.”

“Peace be with you!” Michael calls back, laughing, and Aziraphale scarcely has the frame of mind to register the irony of those words before he is sprinting down the street, miracling himself invisible as his wings unfurl in a blue-white nimbus of haste. 

The sun has set by the time he reaches Gomorrah, but all is bright across the plains.  By some stroke of luck, Michael and Sandalphon have started their grim work with Sodom.  The blaze of holy fire lights the night, turning the sky a putrid orange and streaking white across the sands.  Aziraphale feels the flames warm his feathers as he lands on the outskirts of Gomorrah, tripping into a run as his wings vanish.  He runs to the tavern, the hammering of his heart deafening him to the screams.

He finds Crowley at the table where he left him, as placid and solidly drunk as he was the night before.  It’s as if time has stilled here, a shard preserved for Aziraphale to slip into his pocket and carry away.  He races to the demon’s side, hands scrabbling at his shoulder.  “Crowley!  Get up, we have to go now!”

Crowley blinks blearily, sunglasses askew.  “Wassit?  Back for another round, angel?”

“Don’t be stupid!” Aziraphale shouts.  “The city is doomed!  We must leave!”

It is only then that Crowley seems to register the screams building around them. “Shit.”  He wobbles to his feet and sways on the spot.  “Thought things were getting loud.  Lemme sober up.”

“No time!” 

Aziraphale can feel the fires growing brighter, closer, the cacophony of screams surging as the stench of brimstone and scorched flesh swarms his senses. He drags Crowley into his arms, spreads his wings, and hurtles into the air like a comet.  Crowley gives a strangled screech and throws his arms around Aziraphale’s neck.  The city scythes apart beneath them as they rise into the sky. 

Later, on a hillside overlooking the carnage of Sodom, they watch as Lot’s family flees.  The tiny forms streak across the sand, shadows stretching like dark paths before them. At the last, Lot’s wife pauses, chest heaving.  She turns.

“She shouldn’t have done that.”  Crowley’s voice is flat, long since purged of the slur.

Aziraphale shrugs, shoulders stiff.  He hasn’t exerted himself like that in decades.  “She couldn’t have known the rules, surely.”  He studies the pillar of salt that was once a woman.  “It is a terrible pity.”

For a long moment, Crowley says nothing.  Then, in words like the sparks off a struck flint, he snarls, “I wasn’t talking about her.”  He stands, rounding on Aziraphale, hands balled into shaking fists at his sides.  “A ‘terrible pity?’  Really, angel?  Thousands of humans incinerated in the blink of an eye, and you think it’s a _terrible_ _pity?”_

“I.”  Aziraphale opens and closes his mouth.  He’d expected grumbling, surly thanks disguised as griping.  He didn’t think to expect this.  “Crowley, I—”

“I thought the rainbow was meant to be a promise!”  Crowley is pacing back and forth, all frantic, spring-coiled fury. “What’s the point of promising not to drown the world if you’re just going to burn it instead?”

“I—I don’t know,” Aziraphale flounders.  “I don’t know.”

“Don’t you care enough to ask?  Doesn’t any of your lot care?”

Aziraphale climbs to his feet.  “Now, listen here, Crowley.  It’s not—it’s not that I don’t care.  I just can’t ask.  I can’t question the Almighty’s choices.”

“Why?”

“Because it isn’t done!”

The moment Aziraphale utters the words, he is aware of the lack of them – the emptiness, the impotence.  He drops his gaze to the dirt.  The taste of bile and bloodshed clings in his mouth. 

“Crowley,” he begins.

Crowley raises a hand to silence him.  “Don’t bother.  You know what, angel?  Sometimes I think I had the right of it when I Fell.  I never have a choice, not really, but at least I can ask _why.”_

He’s gone before Aziraphale can respond, wings unfurled and carrying him past the light of the flames, into the gathering dark.  Aziraphale watches him vanish.  A small part of him wants to follow, wants to apologize for the Almighty’s decision, and—no.  It would be wrong to apologize for God’s work because God never errs.  Best not to question Her choices.  The Rebellion was a very long time ago, but it is fresh in his memory still.

Aziraphale stands alone on the hillside, watching Sodom and Gomorrah burn down to ashes. Stock still between the two, a pillar of salt shivers under a stiff wind – then scatters, obliterated and cast into the sands.


	4. Sick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale is ill. Crowley tends to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line about there being no cure for the common cold is borrowed from Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.

 

Angels do not, as a rule, fall ill.  They simply don’t have the fortitude for it.  When you take a celestial being and cram it into a fleshy, juicy, human-shaped corporation, you risk causing a fair bit of trauma without adding the possibility of said corporation malfunctioning in a variety of horrific ways – the fevers, the pus, the clogging of various valves and vessels and orifices, and so on. Besides, falling ill would distract an angel from their heavenly duties.  It’s very difficult to spread peace and love and suchlike when you are battling the urge to vomit or, as the charming human colloquialism goes, “shit your brains out.”

This wisdom is by no means theoretical.  In The Beginning, Upstairs was very keen on making the angels’ experiences on Earth as lifelike as possible.  And lo, the first corporations were endowed with all the weaknesses of a human body. Angels were just as likely to suffer boils, dropsy, leprosy, and baldness as any old human.  It was assumed that, in the event a disease grew truly deadly, an angel could miracle themself well. 

(In fact, the only illness exempt from the first corporations was epilepsy.  The humans were convinced epileptic fits were caused by demonic possession, and it wouldn’t do any good to give the opposite side free points, as it were.  Crowley got a commendation for epilepsy.  This both baffled and amused him.)

The old, disease-prone versions of corporations fell out of favor when the angel Gabriel, after being sent to inform Mary of her pregnancy, developed a head cold which clogged up one nostril and left the other free to breathe.  This caused such epic strife and whinging that subsequent models of corporations were rendered disease-free. 

Therefore, angels do not, as a rule, fall ill.

Most angels, anyway.

The angel Aziraphale had been using his corporation since The Beginning.  Before Armageddon, he’d never seen a need to swap in for the newer model. He was the equivalent of a man using messenger pigeons in the time of the iPhone C.  When Adam Young removed Aziraphale from Madame Tracy’s body, he restored him to his old self – in effect, giving him a fresh pigeon and bidding him get on with it.

There is precisely one angel in all of existence who can fall ill, and he is currently in the back room of a bookshop in Soho, lying on a battered sofa as he sweats and moans. 

“You’re _what?”_ Crowley says. 

“Ill, I'm afraid,” Aziraphale croaks.  “I won’t make good company tonight.  You had better take your drinking elsewhere.”

Crowley sets down the twin bottles of Romanee-Conti and crosses to the sofa, staring down at the prone angel. “You’re in my seat.”

Aziraphale, pallid and sweat-soaked, musters a weak smile.  “I know.  Terribly sorry.”

Crowley is torn between horror and incredulity.  “How did this happen?”

“Occupational hazard.  Comes with the body.”

“Thought your lot didn’t…” Crowley trails off, brow furrowed. Then he nods.  “Ah.”

“Indeed.”

Crowley goes to his knees so he is at a level with Aziraphale.  “This is what you get for not updating, you know.  I’ve only told you to do it a dozen times.”

Aziraphale miracles a hot water bottle onto his brow and sighs.  “Some things are worth caring for.  If you throw away things willy-nilly when they’re no longer of use to you, everything loses its value.”

“That’s all very well and good,” Crowley says, “but you’ve still got snot all over your face.”

“Ugh.”  Aziraphale casts about for a tissue box, looking crestfallen when he finds it empty.  Crowley miracles it full with a snap of his fingers.  The angel beams, radiant in spite of the snot and sweat.  “Thank you.”

Crowley is, for perhaps the billionth time, grateful for the concealment of his sunglasses.  He gestures to the angel’s face.  “Can’t you miracle this away?”

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale sighs, managing an indulgent smile.  _One billion and one,_ Crowley thinks.  “You should know there’s no cure for the common cold.”

Crowley stands, surveying the back room.  Bogie-encrusted tissues litter the floorboards, swarming around a closed book like a flock of doves.  He stoops and picks up the book.  “ _The Picture of Dorian Gray._   Is this one of the comedies?”

Aziraphale sneezes, wipes a string of snot off his nose.  “No.  I suspect it would be rather maudlin for your tastes.”

Crowley makes a noise of disdain.  “Why was it on the floor?”

“Oh,” Aziraphale moans, “I wouldn’t normally treat a book like that, of course, but my thoughts have just been all over the place with this blasted cold…”

Crowley looks at the book in his hands, so old and so worn.  A faint aura of love emanates off the scuffed binding, the creased pages.  He glances at Aziraphale, finds him watching with bleary, heaven-blue eyes.

“A cuppa would do me very well, I think.”  The angel places each word with care, like steps on a wilderness path.  His eyes are wide and pleading.

Crowley curbs the impulse to yield to that look.  “Miracle one for yourself, then.”

“I can’t,” Aziraphale says, a whine creeping into his voice.  “This cold has completely scrambled my mind.  Can hardly tell up from down.”

“You did just fine with the water bottle.”

“I _wanted_ whisky.  The water bottle was a lucky accident.”

Crowley rolls his eyes so extravagantly he’s certain the angel can see them behind his glasses.  “Right.  You’re ridiculous, you know that?”

He snaps his fingers and a cup of Earl Grey appears in his other hand.  He offers it to Aziraphale, who struggles into a sitting position to accept it.  The angel takes a cautious sip, nose wrinkling.  “Crowley, I hate to put you out, but I had rather hoped—”

“Keep pushing and pushing, why don’t you,” Crowley mutters.  With another snap, the Earl Grey turns into Oolong.  Aziraphale’s mouth curves in a smile as he takes another sip.  Crowley’s heart kicks at the sight. 

“Come sit by me,” says Aziraphale, and Crowley finds himself helpless to refuse.  In no time at all, he is seated beside Aziraphale, the warmth of their bodies bleeding into the battered leather beneath them.  _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is open in his hands, and as he reads aloud of starving souls and rose-red youth, Aziraphale leans his head on his shoulder. His touch is fever-hot.  Crowley, ever the serpent, is warmed down to his bones. 


	5. Serious

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley work on their ruse against Heaven and Hell.

It’s a curious experience, this – watching a face he knows so well, a face he _has_ known for six millennia, as it shapes and reshapes before his eyes like wet clay. 

Curious, Crowley thinks, and utterly wrong.

“Oh, blast,” Aziraphale mutters as his face slips back into itself, soured with a moue of frustration.  He sets down the hand mirror he’s been using to monitor his progress, fingers knotting on the tabletop.  “I nearly had it that time.”

The snarl of tension behind Crowley’s ribs loosens.  Aziraphale’s voice is light on his tongue, a breath of cool air.  “Yeah, you nearly did.”

Aziraphale shoots Crowley an envious look.  “I don’t see how you can do it so easily.  You got it right on your first try.”

Crowley reminds himself he is no longer wearing his sunglasses.  Masked in the angel’s face, he has no business wearing them.  He affects a tone as cool as a corpse on the slab and says, “Yes, well.  We _have_ known each other for six-thousand years.  I’m surprised you haven’t memorized my face.”

“I have,” Aziraphale huffs.  “But there’s quite a difference between _knowing_ a face and _wearing_ it.”

Crowley shrugs, because shrugging is simultaneously more eloquent and vague than saying _I can slip into your face like an old coat because I’ve been quite keenly memorizing it for thousands of years._ “Maybe it’s a demon… thing. Wasn’t so difficult, going from serpent-shaped to man-shaped.  Though walking was a bit of a trick.”

Aziraphale flicks Crowley a reproachful look and redoubles his efforts. He screws up his face – jaw set, eyes clamped shut, nose scrunched.  It’s the sort of look he gets when he’s purging a great deal of alcohol from his system.

Crowley finds himself fighting a smile. 

The battle is short-lived.  Crowley watches, increasingly unnerved, as Aziraphale’s face changes – now soft, now familiar, now _not._   The rounded cheeks grow thin.  The smiling mouth flattens.  The smooth jawline slopes into a hard angle.  The downy-white curls grow coarse, darkening to the char of hellfire. 

Aziraphale opens his eyes and beams.  “Finally!”

Crowley coughs past the lump in his throat.  “Nnh.  Not quite.”

Aziraphale consults the hand mirror.  “Bugger.”

Crowley is equal parts scandalized and delighted.  “Angel!  Language.”

“Well, if I’m going to play the demon, I might as well talk the part.” Aziraphale glares at the mirror, blinking hard, but his eyes remain obstinately blue-grey.  “Assuming I can manage that much.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” says Crowley.  If he’s perfectly honest with himself – and he never is – he’s relieved Aziraphale has kept this small piece of himself.  When they decided to undertake this ruse, Crowley could never have predicted the gut-churning wrongness of watching his friend warp into a demonic form.  Aziraphale is by no means a paragon among angels, but this halting progress is like watching a lamb totter alone down a sheer cliff face.  One misstep, and he might Fall.

“Look,” says Crowley, “even I’m not perfect.”

He darts out his tongue, forked and hissing, from Aziraphale’s mouth.  The angel scowls.  “Be serious, Crowley.”

“I am being serious,” Crowley says, seriously.  “If Gabriel gets out the tongue depressors, we’ll know the jig is up.”

“I do wish you would treat this situation with the gravity it deserves. If our respective bosses discover our ploy—”

“Yes, yes,” Crowley sighs.  “Just let me have this.”

Aziraphale picks up the hand mirror with one hand and touches the corners of his eyes with the other, as if to stretch them into compliance.  “I almost had it, but it keeps slipping away—if only I could… anchor it, somehow, make it stay put…”

Sighing, the angel sets down the mirror and looks at Crowley.  It’s a kind of look Crowley knows well – a pleading, wheedling, _I’m-so-helpless-without-you_ expression that has compelled him to drop miraculous favors like so many shed skins over the millennia.  Even on a replica of his face, the look is potent. 

Crowley may have invented the art of wiling, but sometimes he suspects Aziraphale perfected it.

Crowley wants to reach across, to offer an anchor.  He hesitates.  Thinks about the steady pulsing beat of Soho nightclubs, of neon lights daubing lurid pink on the nape of Aziraphale’s neck.  Of far-flung starlight and the sucker punch of _it’s over._

Perhaps the thoughts are as vivid on his face as they are in his memory, for Aziraphale’s pleading softens.  The angel reaches across the table and offers his hand, palm-up.

“I could use a spot of demonic influence,” he says.

Crowley makes a sort of sound he can only hope passes for scorn.  He lays his hand atop Aziraphale’s, determined to be cool and removed.  But all cold-blooded creatures seek warmth, and Crowley cannot ignore the soft, careworn creases of the angel’s palm, the heat suffusing his skin.  He is reminded of daylight slanting through lush leaves, of sun-warmed bark beneath his scales. 

“Oh,” Aziraphale breathes.  Crowley blinks out of his reverie.  The angel’s eyes are bright chips of amber, slashed through by slit pupils. Aziraphale – as Crowey – grins.  “Finally.”

Crowley slips his hand away, flexing his fingers.  “’Bout time.  Best get on with it.”

“Ah—right.  Yes, of course.  I suppose you—no, _I_ should go first, shouldn’t I?” A nervous laugh.  “Goodness.  If this works, it will cause quite a stir.”

“Hmm.  Yeah.” Crowley passes his sunglasses to his mirror image.  “Can’t forget these.  I wouldn’t go anywhere without them.”

Aziraphale picks up the glasses and delicately perches them on the bridge of his nose.  “I might not be quite as spiffing as you, dear boy.  I’ll do my best, of course, but…”

Crowley waves a hand.  “Neh. Don’t worry.  Just try to be as cool as possible and we’ll get through this without a fuss.”

He may be imagining it, but for an instant, Aziraphale’s smile looks strained. “Yes, I expect we must.”

They move to the front door of Crowley’s flat, each wobbly with the novelty of the other’s corporation.  Crowley remembers his first stumbling steps on two legs, the cool stone of Eden’s walls under his feet.  They pause on the doorstep.

“Well?” says Crowley.  “Got any advice for me?”

Aziraphale smiles sadly.  “No.  Gabriel and the others shouldn’t notice anything amiss.”

Crowley nods and reaches for the knob.  Aziraphale places his hand on the doorframe, sealing it shut.  “Just… one thing,” he says.  “Please be careful, Crowley.”

Crowley can’t argue with that sentiment.  If he fails, he won’t be the one to burn. 

“’Course,” he says.  He turns and stalks out of the flat, raising one hand in farewell.  “Be seeing you, angel.”

Silence for a beat.  Then, urgently:  “Crowley—”

Crowley turns just in time to see the door snap shut.  He stares, unblinking, at the spot where Aziraphale stood not seconds ago.  Then he sighs, turns, and strolls down to the pavement.  Down to the Soho bookshop.  Down, inevitably, to Upstairs. 

 


	6. Careful

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Bentley is fed up with Aziraphale and Crowley's dithering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea that the Bentley would encourage Aziraphale and Crowley to get on with it is not wholly mine. You can find loads of fun fan art on Tumblr etc to the same effect, so this chapter was likely partially inspired by that. 
> 
> The end is also strongly reminiscent of Aisene's hilarious novel-length GO book sequel, Manchester Lost, which you can find here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/903880/chapters/1748305. This wasn't intentional, but credit where credit is due!
> 
> Lyrics belong to Queen.

The Bentley is – inasmuch as an inanimate object is able to possess an opinion – terribly besotted with the angel Aziraphale. 

Belonging to a demon for nigh-on a century means the Bentley has inherited some of Crowley’s traits – his powers, his thoughts, his _feelings._   And now, careening down Oxford Street at a comfortable eighty-seven miles per hour, the Bentley’s engine grumbles, much in the way a heart will skip or flip or perform any other anatomically-improbable acrobatics. 

Aziraphale’s grip on the ceiling bar is warm and strong and terrified.  It sends a rush of fondness right down to the combustion chamber and the Bentley puts on an extra burst of speed.  Perhaps, the car thinks, the angel and demon are long-overdue for a little automotive intervention. 

“Careful!” Aziraphale cries.  “Pedestrian ahead!  Fourteen-hundred hours!”

The Bentley swerves to avoid said pedestrian – a tiny old woman tottering across the street – and Crowley rolls his eyes, belying the fond rumble of the car engine. “Think you’d be used to this by now,” he remarks.

 _“Don’t stop me now,”_ the Bentley chimes in.  _“Don’t stop me, cause I’m having a good time, having a good time…”_

Aziraphale blinks.  “Does it—does it usually do that?”

“Do what?” Crowley asks, snaking past a cluster of tourists. 

“Agree with you—”  Aziraphale begins, only to break off in a gasp as they streak past a pair of men bickering on a street corner.  “You could have hit them!”

“Could have.  Didn’t.”

“Really!” the angel huffs.  “If you keep swerving around, I may actually lose my lunch.”

Crowley scoffs.  “You know nausea is just an option for us, angel.”

Aziraphale subsides, lips pursed.  “Well.  My point still stands.”

“You’d never risk the Château Mouton, anyway.”

Aziraphale’s façade of annoyance crumbles under a blissful smile.  “That _was_ quite exquisite.  Very generous of you.”

Crowley grunts.  “Don’t go blabbing.”

 _“I will pay the bill,”_ the Bentley chimes in, _“you taste the wine.  Driving back in style, in my saloon will do quite nicely.”_

The pair fall silent, eyebrows rising in unison.  Then Crowley says, “Huh.  Doesn’t usually do that.”

 _“Just take me back to yours, that will be fine,”_ the Bentley adds, helpfully.

Aziraphale frowns, cheeks pinking.  The Bentley feels his fingers dig into the upholstery of the passenger seat. “What—”

 _“Come on and get it!”_  

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, reaching a shaking hand toward the dash, “I believe your car’s record player has been possessed.”

“It’s a radio, and don’t you dare lay a finger on it.”  Crowley peels one hand off the steering wheel to clamp his fingers around the angel’s, arresting his progress.  “You’ll bless it useless.  Gunk up the works.”

Aziraphale fumbles for words, eyes darting from the dash to Crowley’s hand and back.  When the demon releases him, he turns his gaze to his lap, fingers tightly interlaced. 

“Thought we’d go back to mine,” Crowley says, his voice a masterclass of composure.  “There’s more where that Bordeaux came from.  Well, there will be.  It’s currently the quality of sewer runoff, but I expect it’ll age well by the time we get there.”

“Yes—yes,” Aziraphale mumbles.  “That sounds… lovely.”

Crowley makes a noncommittal noise, but the Bentley can sense the pleasure behind it – a soul-deep purr, as smooth and sonorous as a well-tended engine. The car takes control, veering toward a pothole in reprimand.  The angel and demon lurch in their seats.  

Aziraphale gives a strained chuckle.  “Goodness.  This contraption really has a mind of its own, doesn’t it?”

Crowley narrows his eyes.  A snarl of suspicion coils through him and into the Bentley, purged in a belch of exhaust. “Nah.  Mindless machine, that’s all it is.”

 _“The machine of a dream,”_ the Bentley corrects. 

Crowley scowls, then dismisses the comment with a grunt as he turns into the car park by his flat.  Guiding the Bentley into a restricted spot, he kills the engine with a palpable sense of expectation.  The Bentley soldiers on.  It belongs to Crowley, after all.  They are in accord, even if the demon denies it with his last unnecessary breath. 

 _“I can serenade and gently play on your heart strings,”_ it croons to Aziraphale.  _“Be a Valentino, just for you.”_

Aziraphale splutters, wide-eyed and scarlet.  “Crowley—”

“What in heaven?” Crowley’s pretense at poise begins to splinter.  He snatches at the door handle and boggles when the locks snap down, prisoning them inside.  _“What?”_

The Bentley decides the time for romance and subtlety has passed.  Six millennia of Crowley’s pent-up longing and frustration flood its receiver, shivering through electrons to warp tune and words to the language the car knows best.  _“Let me feel your heartbeat grow faster, faster.”_

Aziraphale grips Crowley’s shoulder.  “Can’t you make it stop?”

 _“Ooh, can you feel my love heat?”_ the Bentley demands, relentlessly.  _“Come and sit on my hot-seat of love.”_

Crowley slams a fist against the dash, which has absolutely no effect.  “Knock it off!”

The Bentley will not be bullied.  It switches tracks with a pop of static and a slippery squeal of notes sliding one into another.  _“With the pistons a pumpin’, and—”_   The words stagger, skip, _“With my hand on your grease gun, mmm, it’s like a disease, son.”_

 Aziraphale groans and covers his face with his hands.  “Oh, God."

“Angel, I—”

_“Get a grip on my boy racer roll bar—”_

“Will you shut the heaven up!” Crowley says in a strangled scream.  He turns to Aziraphale, eyes frantic and pleading behind the sunglasses.  “Angel, I’m so—don’t be upset, it’s—it’s a cocked-up transmission, or—”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Aziraphale chokes out, and reaches a hand into the air to pluck down a dose of ethereal power so potent it shudders through the infernal vehicle.  Crowley winces – the Bentley winces – and the angel snaps his fingers, obliterating the entire world in a blaze of holy light.

Seconds later, Crowley blinks past the radiance stamped across the backs of his eyelids.  He rubs his brow, grimacing.  “What blessed bloody miracle did you just…”

He trails off as the scenery out the window comes into focus.  They are parked on a grassy hillside, the steel and concrete monoliths of London supplanted by lush, sun-dappled canopies of oak trees.  A sea of long grass outside ripples under a summer breeze.

Crowley turns to gawk at Aziraphale.  “Where are we?”

Aziraphale looks at him, eyes determined, chin set—and mouth gone suddenly soft, unsure.  “Away. Alone.”

Crowley has scarcely a moment to think before the angel is leaning in close, hands on his cheek, the nape of his neck.  Their lips brush: once, so gently. So _carefully_.  Crowley licks his lips, tastes redcurrant and cinnamon.  Aziraphale draws back and exhales in a rush.  “Too fast?”

Crowley is furious and thrilled by turns.  “No, get back here, you utter—”  And his words vanish, miracled away by the angel’s hands, the angel’s lips, the angel’s sighs and gasps and wine-stained moans.

 _“Tonight,”_ the Bentley sings, _“I’m gonna have myself a real good time… And the world, I'll turn it inside out, yeah... I'm floating around in ecstasy...”_

 


	7. Tudor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley gets an assignment. Aziraphale is unsettled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slight deviation from the norm. This is a Tumblr prompt I took a little too far, so into the fic it goes!

Aziraphale blinks, a frown knitting his brow.  “Terribly sorry, dear girl, but I must have misheard.  They want you to do _what?”_

Crowley shrugs her velvet-clad, bead-encrusted shoulders.  “Seduce some lordling or another.  All part of the grand plan, apparently.”  Her tone is deeply contemptuous, and Aziraphale knows she wasn’t consulted on said _grand plan._

“Surely… surely your side has done enough?  Divorcing poor Catherine and breaking from the church?”

“Apparently not,” she says. “You didn’t hear it from me, but we have a _lot_ planned for Henry’s next five wives.  This little temptation is just a cog in the machine.”

“But…”  Aziraphale trails off.  Standing motionless on a stage of Tudor opulence, ladies gliding about on their men’s arms like autumn leaves on the wind, he feels suddenly wrong-footed.  “You don’t actually have to, ah…” 

He lifts his goblet for a drink, throat scraped dry.  Crowley wrinkles her nose.  “Eurgh. No.  I’m just going to bat my lashes and keep my bodice laced tightly.” She lifts her arms, flexes her wrists. “This era’s got too many layers, if you ask me.  I can hardly keep track of them all.”

Aziraphale thinks, given Crowley’s current assignment, that an excess of layers may not be so awful. He takes another swig of wine, mouth twisting.  Utter swill.

“Well, I’m off,” Crowley sighs, striding into the melee.  Aziraphale watches her go, preoccupied by the sway of her hips, nauseous in a way no angel needs be. 

“Who is _that?”_  

A whispered sneer. The angel turns.  A pair of noblemen watch as Crowley insinuates herself among the dancers.  They smirk over their goblets, eyes catlike and keen.    

“The Lady Crowley,” one murmurs.  “New on the scene.  Causing quite a stir among the Boleyns.”

A considering grunt.  “She is… singular, isn’t she?”

Aziraphale sets his teeth. In the crowd, one dancer yelps as a muscle spasm grips his leg. 

“Indeed,” says the other. “What are those peculiar spectacles? Have you ever seen their like?”

“I admit, the lady’s spectacles are not the first thing I noticed.”

The noblemen snicker over their goblets.  Aziraphale grips the stem of his own, divine wrath turning the wine to frothing blood. 

“Truly?” the other asks. “She’s a hag!”

“With the right amount of wine,” the nobleman murmurs, “any woman becomes beddable.”

The last strands mooring Aziraphale’s temper break.  He snaps his fingers.  The noblemen startle, then shriek as the wine in their cups churns, wriggles, erupts into maggots, burgeoning and boiling into starving existence.  Their fleshy grey bodies wriggle out of the goblets to land on hands, tumble into billowing sleeves, their thousand thousand mouths working, tireless and insatiable.  The noblemen howl and flail about, knocking into those too slow to give them a wide berth. 

“Really, Aziraphale,” Crowley says later, preoccupied with loosening the ties of her bodice, “I didn’t know you had it in you.  _Maggots._   Thought for a second I might’ve slipped up.”

Aziraphale grunts and takes a swig of his newly-miracled wine.  It’s heady, blood-red and honey-sweet.  It tastes of triumph.  He keeps his expression carefully neutral.

Crowley removes her headdress and sets it aside, the scarlet veil fluttering.  “As far as thwarting me goes, it wasn’t your best work.”

“Well,” Aziraphale says, “perhaps I got a little… overzealous.”

“I’ll say.”  Crowley perches on the arm of Aziraphale’s oak-wrought chair.  “Why _maggots_ , though?”

Aziraphale clears his throat and takes another sip of wine.  “Oh… you know.  Trying to… to bring a few lost souls back to the church, I suppose.”

“Blimey.  That’s biblical-level recruitment, right there. And what did those two nobles do to deserve it?”

“Don’t recall.”  Aziraphale tips back his cup to conceal a smirk.  “Wrong place at the wrong time, I expect.”


	8. Knight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale comes across a Fallen woman in the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am no expert on Arthurian legend or history; this short is written with a lot of artistic liberty. It is loosely meant to take place after Guinevere leaves Camelot with Lancelot.
> 
> Based off of a Tumblr prompt by sappphic: i am begging you on my digital knees, knight of the round table aziraphale and princess crowley. "i thought you were the black knight?" "evil must be fermented everywhere, angel. id rather a dress to armour anyday."

537 A.D.

 

The moment Aziraphale lays a hand on the cloaked figure’s shoulder, intent on dragging him off his horse, he knows he’s made a terrible mistake.

A familiar hum of demonic energy shudders through his gauntlet and up his arm.  He recognizes the aura – sun-warmed scales, shelter from the rain.  Aziraphale releases his grip, but too late, and the momentum topples the figure to the ground with a cry.  The horse gallops out of sight, eyes rolling with fear.

Aziraphale pulls on the reins and half-climbs, half-falls off his own horse.  “Terribly sorry, dear boy, I didn’t mean…”

His voice dwindles as the figure – _Crowley, of course it’s Crowley, up to his usual mischief_ – hobbles upright and pulls back the hood of the cloak. Long, red curls tumble over slim shoulders.  Aziraphale stares.  “Oh. Er.  Dear _girl,_ I mean.”

“That’s dear lady to you,” Crowley snaps.  She presses a hand to the small of her back with a wince.  “Did you have to be so rough?”

“I did say I was sorry.” Aziraphale takes in his adversary’s appearance, curiosity piqued.  He hasn’t seen Crowley like this since the crucifixion.  His eyes catch on her wrists as she pushes the hair out of her face, slim and pale and delicately-veined.  “I thought you were the queen.”

“Incredible.  It’s almost as if the diversion was intentional.”

“So, you’ve sided with Mordred,” Aziraphale surmises.  “Typical.”

“Of course,” says Crowley, gathering her hair back.  Her fingers, deft with the ease of long practice, tie it into a single plait.  “And for the record, Arthur’s not nearly as shiny and perfect as your lot pretends he is.  You’d know, _Sir Aziraphale of the Table Round.”_  

The angel drags his eyes from Crowley’s fingers to meet her golden gaze.  It’s no less disconcerting.  “You know I’m not consulted on these things.”

Crowley scoffs and tosses the plait over her shoulder, head tilted back to expose the pale line of her throat.  Aziraphale drops his gaze to her feet.  _Much better._  “Why—why the change, if I may ask?  You were the black knight not a fortnight ago.”

“Evil may be fomented in any form,” Crowley says.  “Besides, I’d rather a dress than armor any day.  Much less chafing.”

Aziraphale grudgingly nods. The armor really is abominable, heavy and stuffy and rubbing in all the worst places.  “Well, when you put it that way…”

“You should give it a try.” Crowley steps up to Aziraphale’s steed, eyeing the beast warily as her hand moves to the saddle bags.  The horse pins back its ears but otherwise remains still. She digs around in the bags, pulls out a flask with a grin.  Popping out the stopper, she adds, “You’d make a very pretty lady.  All the lads are mad for your coloring.”

Aziraphale feels his face heat.  “Don’t tease. And that’s only water.”

“Not anymore, it isn’t.” Crowley tips back the flask for a drink. “Tell you what.  Let’s stop fomenting and do a little fermenting instead.”

“I—I can’t,” Aziraphale says.  “I have to find Guinevere and return her to Arthur.”

Crowley waves to the darkening sky above.  “She’s long gone now.  Look, you’ve made the effort; Heaven will be very proud of you.”  Aziraphale dithers, and she adds, “Tell them you came across a young woman alone in the woods.  Deeply troubled.  Possibly Fallen.”  Aziraphale shoots her a look and she waggles her eyebrows.  “C’mon, angel.  A little temptation never hurt anybody.”

Aziraphale feels his resolve – never fortified to begin with – crumble under the demon’s logic.  He plucks the flask from her hand and takes a heavy draft, tasting complex spices, a crisp-fresh finish. 

“Well,” he sighs, “best make up a fire, then.”

They spend the next few hours drinking and talking, pleasantries giving way to jokes as the wine loosens their tongues.  At some point, Crowley nicks Aziraphale’s visor and puts it on.  She play-acts a great mouth, opening and closing the lid with each word.  They find the whole thing uproariously funny.  The flask they pass back and forth never runs dry. 

Later, drunker still, Crowley announces she has grown weary and lies down to sleep.  Aziraphale watches the dying firelight play across her curves and angles, lighting her hair to polished bronze.  Hand pillowed under one cheek, she watches him watching her. 

“Well, don’t sit there like a stone,” she says.  “Come sleep beside me.”

“I…”  Aziraphale’s throat is thick, his tongue clumsy.  “I don’t need to sleep.  Neither do you.”

Crowley shrugs, eyelids drooping.  “S’nice. That’s all.”

Her eyes close, and for a long while, she is silent.  Just when Aziraphale thinks she has fallen asleep, she murmurs, quietly, “He threatened to throw her to the dogs, you know.  Let them tear her apart.”

Aziraphale tenses. Were he sober, he would know better than to take the bait, but the heady fug of alcohol has robbed him of his wits. “Who?”

“Arthur.”  She sounds almost too tired to be scornful – tired after the day’s ride, tired after centuries of watching humans throw one another to the dogs.  She yawns, settles.  “Not so shiny and perfect, after all.”

She falls asleep after that, and Aziraphale watches her long into the night.  He has never learned the human trick of slumber – has never seen a need. But perhaps the drink has something to do with it, or perhaps it is the soul-deep contentment of watching Crowley, still and peaceful.  The sharp angles of her body seem to soften, the nervy strain eases.  He tries to recall the last time he saw her so calm. He finds he cannot. 

It may be a waking dream or a figment of his muddled imagination, but sometime later, swimming up from a deep darkness, he feels a light touch on his face.  He is still seated, elbows propped on his knees, but his mind floats elsewhere.  A familiar gaze brushes the edges of consciousness.  A sense of security stretches around him like the boughs of a great, ancient tree.

The next thing he knows, Aziraphale is blinking, muzzy but alert, and the night has given way to dawn. The fire has been covered in dirt and a protective ward laid around the clearing, humming with demonic power.  As Aziraphale stands, dazed, the ward vanishes. He is alone and his horse is gone. Taken by a certain Fallen woman, no doubt.

A scrap of parchment sits on the grass where Crowley had lain, soaking up the morning dew. Aziraphale picks it up, shakes off droplets.  The note is scrawled in charcoal, in a hand known only by angels and demons.

_Angel,_

_Nasty battle coming up.  Camlann.  I’m leaving before it gets really out of hand.  You should do the same.  DO NOT give me cause to come back._

_-C_

“Foul fiend,” Aziraphale mutters.

Sighing, he tucks the note away and rises stiffly to his feet.  The trudge back to Camelot is long and lonely, but he will get there eventually.


	9. Seeds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley finds the most exquisite creature in the Garden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another prompt filled on Tumblr, from needscaffeine: Greek gods au for Ineffable Husbands. Short but sweet!

When Crowley sees him, that first time in the Garden, he is grateful for his cold, vestigial heart. It does not need to beat, needs no blood nor air to live.  Demons’ hearts are inert, forever unmoved.

But the sight of the angel in the garden – Aziraphale, guardian of the Eastern Gate, smiling gently as he plucks an apple from the branch, dappled sunlight dancing over his hair to settle, languidly, on the bare slope of his neck – that sight could make even a demon’s dead heart leap.  

Crowley is slithering off his bough before he can question himself, before terror can take hold – _not such a creature, never for you._ Scales melt into skin, cold blood grows hot.  He totters across the green to the angel, one hand heavy with the fruit that wasn’t there a moment ago.  

The crisp snap of apple flesh is obscenely loud in his ears.  Aziraphale, realizing he is no longer alone, looks up.  He chews contemplatively, swallows.  A rivulet of juice runs from the corner of his mouth down to his chin.  

Crowley’s human throat runs dry.  “That’s…”  He coughs. “That’s not the best the garden has on offer, you know.”

Aziraphale blinks, curiosity piqued.  His eyes, Crowley notes, are grey and green and blue and brown all at once, the soft variations of moss on bark.  His fingers are damp with juice, the nails dirty.  

Crowley offers the pomegranate, willing his hand not to shake.  “This is even better.”

“You’re tempting me.” But Aziraphale eyes the fruit: gluttony, curiosity.  

“Only if you want it,” Crowley says.  “No strings attached.”

Aziraphale steps closer, close enough for Crowley to feel the movement of the air between them.  His hands close around Crowley’s, lift the fruit from his grasp.  The imprint of his skin burns and sings at once.  

Aziraphale plunges his thumbs into the skin and splits the fruit down the middle.  Blood-drop seeds shower the grass.  Fingers dripping, the angel digs out a seed and pops it into his mouth.  A look of angelic rapture crosses his face.  “Oh.  Exquisite.”

Crowley doesn’t make a sound.  If he does, he fears it won’t be coherent.  

Aziraphale gouges out a handful of seeds and offers them, hand outstretched, smile gone a touch wicked. Tempting him.  “Have some.”

Crowley’s heart thunders in his ears.  


	10. Carry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley struggles with the aftermath of the Crucifixion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on a Tumblr prompt from mcrwillbutthurtyou: "I'll carry you if I have to!"
> 
> Note: the potter's field was purchased by the priests after Judas gave back the thirty silver pieces he had received for betraying Jesus. It was meant for the unmarked graves of paupers and foreigners.
> 
> Some lines and imagery borrowed from Regina Spektor's "Samson."

Hours after the Crucifixion, Crowley sits on the edge of a potter’s field with no memory of how she got there.  The dirt is baking-hot beneath her, the dying sunlight a suffocating weight on her shoulders. She is scorched through and through, but still her heart is a cold stone in her breast. 

Crowley stares out across the field.  A vast, lifeless expanse of dirt and dead grass, unloved and unmourned.  Thirty silver pieces purchased this plot: the price of one man’s lifeblood.  One man hangs dead from a cross and another hangs dead from a tree, and this godforsaken spit of land is all that’s left between them. 

Crowley grits her teeth, throat tight, eyes stinging.  She has not yet surrendered to weeping, not after Sodom and Gomorrah, not after the Flood.  She will not surrender now.

A presence feathers across the edges of her senses: a light, gossamer brush.  “There you are.  I thought I had lost you.”

Crowley shakes her head.  “Go away, angel.”

“Crowley.”  Softly, kindly.  Tenderly carving her apart.  “Where will you go now?”

 _I don’t know,_ she thinks.  _Maybe I won’t go anywhere.  Maybe I’ll sit here until my body returns to the dirt.  Join all those poor fools in the field._

“Crowley.” 

“Angel.”  A rasping scrape of sound.  “Leave me be.” 

Aziraphale is silent for a long moment.  Then, just when Crowley thinks he may have gone, his fingers brush her shoulder.  She stiffens. “Aziraphale.  Don't.”

“You shouldn't be alone right now,” Aziraphale says.  “Please.  I… I have a room at an inn.  Come with me.”

Crowley wants to snap and cut and cast him off, but the weight smothers her words.  She is inert, limp and cast into deep waters, and the touch on her shoulder is a lifeline just within reach. 

Crowley doesn’t know what she wants – to hold on with all her might, or to let the line slip through her fingers.  Let herself sink.

Perhaps Aziraphale senses her indecision, for, with a hearty dose of no-nonsense briskness, he says, “I _will_ carry you, you know.  If I have to.”

She tries to laugh, really she does, but it comes out raw.  Lifting her head, she pushes back her hair and swallows past the threat of tears.  It’s this weak body, she thinks, this mortal shell with its hammering heart and salt-choked throat.  She hates it.

“Right,” she manages.  “We don’t want you embarrassing yourself, after all.”

The barest hint of a smile.  “That’s the spirit.”

Crowley follows the angel away from the potter’s field, but still it lingers in her mind.  The dusty odor of grave dirt.  The stalks of grass, brittle as desiccated bones.

They go to a small, quiet inn on the outskirts of Jerusalem, passing strangers unseen and unremarked.  Aziraphale ushers Crowley into a stuffy room – scarcely bigger than a broom cupboard – and closes the door.  A candle lights at a flick of his fingers.  He leads her to a little cot and sits, patting the spot beside him. His voice is gentle but firm.  “Lie down.  You look wretched.”

Under normal circumstances, Crowley might have made a joke, but she cannot dredge up the energy.  She sits. The weight is still upon her, deadening her to the world. 

A memory comes to her, unbidden – a man who lived and died hundreds of years ago. A man whose strength was shorn by the woman he loved.  The candlelight dances orange and yellow across Aziraphale’s still face, his unblinking stare.  

The weight is pushing Crowley down, crushing her.  She can’t breathe – _you don’t need to breathe, you blighted fool –_ and suddenly her shoulders are shaking, sobs clawing up from deep in her chest, and her vision blurs, and she is weeping for the first time since the world began.  Her lungs are full of water and she is drowning. 

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale murmurs.  His arms are around her, keeping her in one piece.  “Dear girl, dear girl…”

He says little else until her tears are spent, until she has sobbed herself into exhaustion.  When she is done, she miracles a pair of shears into a trembling hand.  The metal gleams in the yellow light as she offers it to Aziraphale. 

The angel’s fingers are gentle as they run through her hair, nails rasping faintly on her scalp.  With each _snip_ of the shears, a hank falls away.  The weight eases.   _Snip._   A silver piece tumbles upwards, back into a Pharisee’s hand.  _Snip._   A rope slithers off a tree branch.  _Snip._   A bloody nail falls, a wound knits together.  _Snip._   Aziraphale is slow and methodical.  Reverential. His thumb brushes the shell of Crowley’s ear. 

“There,” the angel says.  The candle has burned down low. 

Crowley straightens and touches a hand to the nape of her—no, _his_ neck.  He shivers.  “You forget how it feels,” he says, feeling Aziraphale’s gaze on him.

“It’s a bit of a botched job,” Aziraphale says, apologetic.

“It’ll do.”

“Stay here tonight.”  Aziraphale fiddles absentmindedly with a coil of red hair.  “You needn’t be alone.”

Later, in the dark, he asks, “Where will you go?”

Crowley knows where he’s meant to go – Hell has bound him for Rome, but he has no stomach for the Colosseum, the lions rending prisoners for sport.  _Be kind to each other.  What a laugh._ “Dunno.  Maybe Germania.  I can foment unrest among the beserkers.”

Aziraphale hums, but the careful aversion of his gaze is eloquent enough.  _You’re running away, you old serpent._ “Just as well.  I would take care if I were you.  The Romans will be there soon enough.”

Crowley makes no response.  For hours, he tries to sleep, but he cannot quiet his thoughts.  When dawn stretches the first pale rays of light over Jerusalem, Crowley gives up and rises without a sound.  He goes to the door.

“Be careful,” Aziraphale murmurs, softly.  So softly it might have been a sigh of the wind outside.  Crowley hesitates for the briefest moment before opening the door and slipping out.

There are whispers, later, rumors that penetrate even the wild pine forests of Germania. 

_Jesus of Nazareth has come back to life._

_No, his Apostles stole the body to fool people into thinking he had returned._

_He is alive._

_He is dead._

_He is gone._

Crowley brushes each aside and tempts the beserkers to wrath, felling Roman soldiers like wheat beneath the scythe. 

And then, a whisper:  _An angel rolled away the stone in front of the tomb, then sat on it._

Of all the rumors, Crowley believes that one without a shadow of doubt.  It’s such a little thing, really, but it’s so plainly _Aziraphale_ that it must be true. Of all the angels in Heaven, only one would carry out an impressive feat and then cock it up so completely by squandering it. 

Crowley can practically hear Aziraphale wheezing as he plops down on the stone.  _“I’ll be with you in just a moment, dear ladies, I only need to catch my breath…”_

Deep in the harsh, pitiless wilds of an untamed land, Crowley laughs for what feels the first time in millennia.  He runs a finger through his close-cropped hair.  His heart is light. 


	11. Children

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale must contend with the Them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based off a Tumblr prompt by flipwizardmcgay: “It’s over. They’re not going to hurt you again.”

Aziraphale is not, as a general rule, overly fond of children. 

Oh, they’re wonderful, of course.  They’re wonderful _as a concept._ Aziraphale may not be in Heaven’s best books, so to speak, but he still subscribes to their beliefs regarding children.  _‘For the kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children,’ ‘you are all children of God,’ ‘the riches inherited by God’s children,’ et cetera._ Gabriel may have called Adam Young a brat, but Above is – at least officially – in favor of kids. 

Broadly speaking, Aziraphale loves children.  He’s an angel, after all.  He loves everyone, and that includes children. 

Less broadly – in the narrow confines of his beloved bookshop, for example – Aziraphale is happy to keep them at a distance.  So, when _the_ Them show up at the front door on a cool, crisp day in late October, the angel is understandably alarmed.

“Hullo,” says Adam Young.  He holds the lead for Dog, who stands stock-still beside him, eyes flashing incarnadine.  Pepper, Brian, and Wensleydale flank him.  

Aziraphale fends off a full-body shudder with every scrap of angelic willpower he can muster.  Adam Young may be a normal boy at heart, but the rest of him remains very much the occult equivalent of ten million nuclear warheads.  The intensity of his focus is unsettling.

“A-ah,” the angel stammers.  “Adam Young. What a pleasant surprise.”

“Is that him?” Pepper demands.  She eyes Aziraphale, lip curling.  “He doesn’t _look_ like a demon.” 

“I never said _he_ was the demon,” Adam replies. “He’s the demon’s friend.”

“Actually, I don’t think demons can have friends,” says Wensleydale.  “Because they’re evil.”

“Yeah.”  Brian wipes a mud stain – the origin of which is a mystery – on his shirt.  His eyes widen and he grins.  “Maybe he’s possessed by the demon?”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s quite the case,” Aziraphale fumbles.  He does wish the children would quiet down a little. If Crowley hears them speculating about who’s possessing who, he’ll never let Aziraphale hear the end of it. “You’re… looking for Crowley?”

“Uh-huh.”  Adam angles his gaze past Aziraphale, into the near-empty bookshop.  “He’s here, right?  We need to ask him for advice.”

“Whatever could you need—”  Aziraphale begins, only to fall silent as a familiar demonic presence crowds his senses. He turns and sees Crowley sauntering toward him. 

“Angel, there’re a pair of tourists looking quite keen about the Ian Fleming books,” he says.  “I’d get them to clear out if I were you.  I keep telling you, move the Bond books to storage.  You might think they’re drivel, but they have some serious—”

Crowley looks back toward Aziraphale and catches sight of the Them. He draws up short.  “Oh!  Uh. Hey, um, kids.”

Pepper looks even less impressed than before.  “This is him?  Seriously?”

“Yeah.”  Adam strolls past Aziraphale into the bookshop with Dog and the Them in tow. Aziraphale watches the procession pass in bewilderment.

Pepper cuts straight to the point.  “We need you to teach us how to be devils.”

Crowley darts his eyes from the Them to Aziraphale and back.  “Um.  What?”

“For Halloween,” Adam clarifies.  “We’re going as devils.  But we don’t know how to act properly evil, so I thought, why not ask a real-life devil?”

“M’a demon, actually,” Crowley mumbles, apparently immune to the irony of Adam’s statement.  He considers the Them, head cocked.  Then, much to Aziraphale’s horror, he nods.  “Yeah, all right.  Why not.”

“Why _not?”_ Aziraphale echoes.  “My dear, surely you can’t be—”  He freezes when Adam turns and pins him with a speculative look.  Mellowing, the angel stammers, “W-well, perhaps if you took your… er, tutelage outside…”

Adam shrugs.  “I dunno. I think right here is fine.”  He looks around the shop.  “Seems to me that you spend a lot of time here.  Might help you teach us better in your nat’ral environment, right?”

Aziraphale directs a withering look at Crowley, who averts his gaze.  “Uh.  I guess.”

“I really think…”  Aziraphale trails off; he knows when a battle is lost.  He threads his fingers together, knuckles white.  “Please be careful of the books.  They are quite valuable.”

He spins around and stalks toward the counter, intent on taking his wrath out on the first customer to cross him. 

The next hour is an exercise in tolerance.  Crowley gets right down to the business of teaching the Them how to be proper demons, his gusto belying the apologetic glances he keeps shooting Aziraphale’s way.  From what the angel can gather in his covert eavesdropping, demonic work mostly amounts to being a nuisance. 

“Another good—er, bad act of evil is never replacing the loo roll,” Crowley says. “That one’s a sure-fire win. Never fails to drive the humans mad.”

“I do that already,” Brian says proudly.  _“And_ I never flush.”

Crowley winces.  “Yeah, you’re a proper demon, all right.”

“This is boring,” Pepper says.  “Don’t you do real evil stuff?  Like, killing people and all that?”

“There’s more to being evil than killing people,” Crowley says with startling patience. 

“I don’t see why you want to celebrate Halloween at all,” Aziraphale says, stopping by their gathering with an armful of books – a clever pretext on his part, if he may be so bold.  “It’s only a new-fangled American holiday.”

“Actually, you can’t _own_ a holiday,” says Wensleydale.  “American doesn't own Halloween.  Holidays are for everyone.  As long as they’re not religious.”

Aziraphale is sorely tempted to tell the little know-it-all to shove it, but Adam Young’s focus hones in on him with hawkish intensity, so he restrains himself.  “Of course,” he says coldly. 

Brian plucks a book off the shelf and leafs through the pages.  “Is folding the corners demonic?  My parents hate it when I do that.”

“Ye—no,” Crowley says, catching Aziraphale’s warning glare.  “Nah, s’not really evil.  Nope.”

Adam glances between the angel and demon.  “Sounds right.”

Pepper looks at the book in Brian’s hand with disdain.  “Ugh.  _Peter Pan_ is so sexist.”

Aziraphale’s temper slips its bonds.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  It’s a children’s book.”

“It is!” Pepper counters.  “It’s all boys doing the fun stuff and Wendy has to be like their mum!  And Tiger Lily—”

“What about this?” Brian says, clearly still stuck on demonic acts against literature.  He jams one finger up his nose and pulls it out, a yellow-green gobbet clinging to the dirty nail.  Then, much to Aziraphale’s horror, he smears the bogie on the inside cover of a first-edition _Peter Pan._

“Crowley,” Aziraphale chokes.  He’s never fainted in his entire existence, but there’s a first time for everything.

Crowley, much to his credit, keeps a flimsy veneer of composure as he swipes the book from Brian’s hands.  “Books really aren’t the way to go,” he says.  Aziraphale feels the fabric of the universe pop a stitch and re-knit as the bogie dissolves into nothingness.  “Not enough people care about them.  The effect isn’t widespread.”

“Not enough—”  Aziraphale sputters, indignant, only to stop dead when he sees Dog sniffing a shelf with Intent.  “Adam, dear boy, if you could please take, ah, Poochie outside, I would appreciate it ever so much…”

Adam considers the former hellhound.  “Think I’ll keep him with me, thanks.  He’s not used to the big city.”

“There’s a fenced-in yard outside,” Aziraphale says, a trifle desperately.  There wasn’t one a moment ago, and miracling around the logistics of Soho was a trial, but the angel is growing more and more desperate.  “Surely it needs to relieve itself?”

“Nah,” says Adam.  “He’s properly trained.  He won’t make a mess.”

 In a feat of truly miraculous timing, Dog cocks a leg and wees on the shelf. Aziraphale’s heartbeat slams in his temples.  Dumping his books on the nearest open shelf, he hurries over to the little beast, waving his hands at it.  “Oh, for pity’s sake!”

“Got it,” Crowley says quickly.  He miracles the puddle out of existence with a snap of his fingers.  “See?  Not a stain, angel.”

“Cor!”  Brian is amazed.  “Can you show us how to do that?”

“Actually, I don’t think we can,” says Wensleydale.  “On account of we’re not real demons.”

“Shoo!” Aziraphale hisses at Dog.  “Shoo, you—you little mongrel!”

“Hey,” Adam says, and while his tone is mild, the rumble of irritation that sweeps through the bookshop is _not._  Aziraphale should heed it, really he should, but he can’t stand idly by while children run riot and infernal dogs eject _fluids_ in his shop.  He waves his hands closer at Dog, intent on fending him off.  Dog’s lips peel back in a snarl.

Crowley’s voice is strained.  “Angel—”

Too late.  Aziraphale shrieks as Dog’s teeth sink into his hand, flowering fires of pain.  He yanks his hand back and clutches it to his chest.  Dog growls, eyes glittering red. 

“I’m sorry,” Adam hastens to say.  “I didn’t think he’d do that.”

“Actually, Mr. Fell,” says Wensleydale, “it was a defense mechanism. Little dogs like Dog have a high prey drive and you got into his space.  Actually, you should have known not to do that, because growling is a warning that…”

“Ugh!”  On the other side of the shop, Pepper tosses a book to the floor in disdain.  “ _The Iliad_ is even worse than _Peter Pan!_ My mum says…”

“Look at this, Mr. Crowley!” Brian calls.  “See that book, with the fancy cover?  I bet I can hit it from all the way across the room!”  He hawks deep in his throat. 

Aziraphale has never killed anything before, but, frantic, furious, and helpless, he suddenly sees the appeal of cold-blooded murder.  “That’s quite enough of that!”

The Them ignore him, and several things happen in swift succession.  Dog squats on the floorboards.  Pepper pulls a copy of _The Odyssey_ from the shelf.  Wensleydale keeps talking.  Brian spits a wad of saliva and phlegm. 

The few remaining customers vanish, dispatched outside the shop with no memory of the past few minutes.  A blazing white light erupts from Aziraphale and floods the room to press, incandescent, against the dust-coated windows.  The dowdy, bookish angel suddenly looms, menacing and full of holy wrath, flaming sword raised to strike.  His eyes glow with the searing heat of Heavenly justice.  Crowley cowers behind the nearest shelf; Dog cowers behind Adam’s legs; the Them stare, spellbound.  Brian’s loogie evaporates with a hiss like grease on hot metal. 

“THAT IS QUITE ENOUGH OF THAT,” Aziraphale says.  His voice resonates, multiplied and overlayed like a screaming horde of berserkers.  “STEP AWAY FROM THE BOOKS, PLEASE.”

The Them obey.  They cluster around Adam, eyes wide, mouths ajar. 

“NOW.”  Aziraphale sweeps the flaming sword toward the door, which obediently flies open.  “GET.  OUT.  OF MY BOOKSHOP.”

The Them look to Adam, who nods.  “Yeah.  C’mon, I think we learned enough.”  He leads them to the open door, ushers them out.  He gives the angel and the demon a thoughtful look.  “Sorry.  I’ll leave you two alone now.”

He leaves.  The door snaps shut behind them, locks clanking into place.  Aziraphale sags as the holy wrath leaves him, his sword – a mere illusion – melting into the air.  He feels ready to burst into tears.  Or to smite something.  He hasn’t decided which. 

“Angel.”  Crowley’s voice is gentle, the tone one might use to soothe a wild creature.  “They’re gone.  It’s over.  They’re not going to hurt you again.”

Aziraphale wraps his arms around himself.  “Don’t tease.”

“Sorry.”  Crowley slinks closer, still wary.  “Gosh. I thought your lot were all for _suffering the little children.”_

Aziraphale sniffles.  “Well, my dear, I c-could only suffer so much.”

“Ah, angel.  There, there.”  Crowley’s tone is sneering, but the concern in his eyes is genuine.  “Let me see.”

“Wh-what?”

“Your hand.  That little beast got you good, didn’t he?”

“Oh.”  Aziraphale holds out his trembling hand.  “I-I suppose it did.”

Crowley’s fingers enfold him, delicate but sure.  Aziraphale stares at the floorboards as his vision swims and the demon presses gentle touches to the bite marks.  “Didn’t break the skin, but might as well…”

Aziraphale swallows thickly.  The pain evaporates in prickling warmth.  “Thank you.”

“Nnh.  No problem.” A beat.  “I’m sorry.  For letting them stay in the shop.”

“We didn’t have a choice, really,” the angel mutters.

“I don’t know.  Adam Young’s not all bad.”

Aziraphale mangles a laugh.  “I suppose not.  For an Antichrist.”

“Aziraphale…”

“I _hate_ them, Crowley.”

“You’re an angel.  You don’t hate anything.”

“But they’re so _loud!_ And messy!  And annoying!”

“They’re kids.  Trust me, adults are loads worse.”

Aziraphale sighs and wipes his eyes with one hand.  Despite having healed the bite, Crowley still holds his other hand, and he is reluctant to take it back.  “Oh, I know, dear boy.  Please don’t think less of me for it, my nerves are just so…”

“Don’t worry,” Crowley says.  “Tell you what.  Let’s close up shop and open up that Talisker you’ve got squirreled away, yeah?  The eighteen-year one.”

Aziraphale gives him a watery smile.  “My dear, that would be wonderful.”

They close the shop.  As Aziraphale locks the front door, another miracle sings through the air, a plucked harp string vibrating through reality.  He blinks, unlocks the door, and opens it.  A new sign has appeared.

_‘No dogs allowed.’_

The angel closes the door and locks it again.  He turns, beaming.  Crowley smiles back.

 

-

 

That Halloween, the Them go trick-or-treating as angels.


	12. Rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale, dwelling on his mistakes, is surprised by a visitor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr prompt that I changed a little (sorry!). 
> 
> rcglasses: GO prompt idea? Spending time with the Them after the apocalypse, Aziraphale gets a nagging thought that he can never have children. Crowley is there to comfort.

It’s Gabriel who plants the seed in his mind, oddly enough – odd that one of the beings least enamored of Adam Young could rouse Aziraphale to the boy’s defense. 

They are at their customary check-in meeting, the sort that have become distinctly less customary since Armageddon failed to occur.  Crowley warns Aziraphale not to attend constantly, fretting that they will discover the ruse or overcome their fear and destroy him, but Aziraphale is less concerned.  Upstairs scarcely knew him before Armageddon; they cannot possibly know him now. 

Besides, skipping meetings has always bothered him.  He might have _gone native,_ as it were, but he still believes in punctuality and doing things the Proper Way.    

“Well, Aziraphale,” Gabriel says, a little too briskly to be casual, “it sounds like everything is going…”  A pause, the phrase _as expected_ delicately skirted. “…as usual.”

“Indeed.”  Aziraphale clasps his hands behind his back and slants a look at the other Archangels. Sandalphon and Uriel stand at a distance, Michael a few daring steps closer.  All three look like startled deer, frozen on the cusp of bolting.  Feeling a little smug and a little sorry for them, he says, “Well, I suppose I should be on my way.”

Gabriel nods with a tight smile and turns on his heel.  As the Archangels stride out, Aziraphale catches a scrap of their muttering, Sandalphon’s reedy whine:  “…if only that Antichrist boy hadn’t…”

“If only _someone_ hadn’t mislaid him,” Michael adds.

“We should have dealt with that brat long ago,” Gabriel says.  He never bothered to learn the trick of quieting himself, has never considered that someone may not want to hear him.  His voice carries.  “Thrown him into the ocean.  Like the Nephilim.”

-

Seated alone on a bench in St. James’s Park, Aziraphale stares into the middle distance.  His mind is far away, his skin insensate to the warm drizzle of rain as it gathers like clotting blood.  His thoughts are a wound, at once raw and knitted, oozing and bandaged.  His gaze may be vacant, but his ethereal senses are immersed in another place: a place of scabby knees and dirt-crusted fingernails, of sunlight skewering through branches and the rapid percussion of cards snapping on tire spokes.  Aziraphale is physically in London, but his thoughts circle Tadfield in silent flight. 

There they are, in Hogback Wood – three children, one Antichrist, and one former Hellhound.  The children are all dressed in striped shirts and tattered jeans.  The girl, Aziraphale forgets her name, she has a bandana cinched around her head, wiry wisps of curls escaping every which way. The bespectacled boy wears a carefully-arranged eyepatch.  The grubby boy is sleeved in smeared ink marks on both arms, designs that bring Crowley’s serpent mark to mind. 

Standing at the center of their group, a wooden sword clasped in one hand – little more than a short stick tied to a long one, playacting hilt and blade – is Adam Young. He lifts his chin, resolute. 

“You’ve mutinied for the last time, first mate Brian,” he says in a tone of unshakable authority.  “Now you gotta walk the plank.”

“But it wasn’t just me!” Brian protests.  “Wensleydale made me do it!”

“Actually,” says Wensleydale, “I’m only the pirate cook.”  His voice is the tonal equivalent of a side-eye.  “I can’t _make_ you do anything.”

“I told you,” Adam cuts in, “you can be first mate next time.  Brian’s first mate now because he picked the longer straw.  ‘Sides, without you, we’d all starve on the high seas.”

“Why’re the seas high?” Brian asks, unperturbed by his death sentence.  “Are the waves taller than normal?”

“Don’t be stupid,” the girl sneers.  “It means they’re full of adventure.”

“Pepper’s right,” Adam says.  “It’s only a figure of speech.”

Aziraphale’s mind floats, unbidden, away from the bickering children.  It floats away from the time and the place, rising and rising through the years, the decades, the centuries, the millennia. It alights in another world, an older one.  A harder one. 

He sees them, each face stark and cut-glass precise even in memory.  The children before the flood.  Most were ordinary, of course:  human through and through.  But there had been others.  Children with an uncanny brightness in their eyes, children who were stronger, sharper, and more beautiful than the others.  They grew immense, formidable, and left their human playmates behind to wriggle and rot in the dust.  People whispered that such children were favored by God, but that was only propaganda.  _Giants,_ the Hebrews called them.  _Nephilim._

Heaven’s mistake, that’s what they were: children born of unions between angels and human women.  Back then, when the world was new, the angels had looked upon God’s favored children with envy.  Envy breeds contempt, and contempt breeds a desire to see a foe laid low.  And what better way to ruin the humans than to defile their women?

Aziraphale had never been involved in the mess with the Nephilim.  Perhaps he had been soft toward humans, even then, or perhaps he had unconsciously seen the writing on the wall and known to keep his distance.  He was but an innocent bystander.

 _“Not the kids,”_ Crowley had said, the words tinged with shock, disgust, horror.  _“You can’t kill kids.”_

God hadn’t liked the Nephilim.  She hadn’t liked a great deal of things about the new world She’d made.  And so, in Her infinite wisdom, She rent the world apart. A handful of humans survived, but not one of them carried a drop of angelic blood in their veins. 

Aziraphale had thought himself an innocent bystander.  Now, looking back, he wonders. 

Lost in the mire of memory, Aziraphale is startled back to the present by a blow of occult energy.  Reeling, hands unconsciously clutching the seat of the bench, he strains his sight on Hogback Wood.  Adam Young stares back at him, brow furrowed. 

Then, abruptly, the Antichrist is sitting beside him on the bench.  The stick in his hand is transformed, a sword gleaming with tongues of hellfire.  The angel startles.  “A-Adam. What a pleasant—”

“Why’re you watching me?” Adam asks, without venom or preamble. 

“I…”  Aziraphale trails off, considers making excuses.  Decides against it. I don’t know.”

Adam gives Aziraphale a narrow look, and the angel fights an urge to shrink back.  This boy could crack open his head like an egg, spill out his thoughts in stringy runnels. Aziraphale knows this, and so does Adam. 

“I could make you tell me,” the boy says, “if I wanted.”

Aziraphale remembers uncanny eyes, minds as keen as honed blades.  “If you wanted to, yes.”

Adam swings his legs and stares at Aziraphale.  Drizzling rain clings to his curls, runs down his face in rivulets. Droplets hiss and steam off the burning steel of his sword.  “Where’s your friend?”

Aziraphale blinks, thrown.  “I… I don’t know.”

“Seems wrong, you without him,” Adam remarks. 

“It is,” Aziraphale admits, and is startled by his own candor.  Adam must be leaning on him, just a little.  “Now, that’s hardly sporting.”

“You were spying on me.”

“Aha.  Point taken.”

“Seems to me that if someone tries to shoot you and then spies on you, you should be allowed.  A little.”

Aziraphale gives a nervous titter.  “W-well, you do forget that we helped you.  Between those two things.”

“Yeah.”  Adam lifts his sword, considering.  Firelight plays hellish and bright across his face, and his gaze is distant.  “Guess you did.”  He lowers the blade and looks at Aziraphale.  “What’s wrong, then?”

“Nothing,” Aziraphale sighs.  “Only I’m very old, and I’ve made many mistakes.”

“Huh.”  Adam shrugs. “I don’t see why grown-ups are so stuck on what they did wrong.  They can always try and do better.”

Aziraphale turns and stares, owlish, at the boy.  He sits, slouched and rain-damp and grubby, all the power in the universe clasped in his fist. 

“Your friend’s coming,” Adam says.  “I think he’s worried, so I’ll go.”

“Oh.”  The sound is barely more than a breath.  “Well. Until next time, Adam.”

“Bye.”

When Crowley happens upon Aziraphale – looking for all the world like he’s out on a stroll, belied only by the tense line of his shoulders, the briskness of his steps – he finds the angel alone.  Aziraphale looks up at him and offers a faint smile.  “Crowley.”

“Aziraphale.”  An edge rasps along the syllables of his name.  “You should’ve let me know you were back.”

“I only just arrived.”

“Still.”  Crowley’s mouth slants, purses.  Aziraphale wants to learn the corners of that mouth, the softness and demand.  “You could’ve…”

 _He really was worried,_ Aziraphale realizes. All the fretting and discouragement – all to cover his fear. 

Aziraphale stands and Crowley trails off, knowing before he’s aware.  The angel has made many mistakes over the millennia – things he’s done and things he’s left undone – and suddenly it seems the simplest thing in all of Creation to do one good thing, and enfold the demon in his arms.  Crowley is angular but pliant, stiff for just an instant before seeming to melt against him, into him.  His mouth tastes of rain.

“Oh,” Crowley says when they part.  His face is flushed up to the tips of his ears.  “Huh.  Missed—missed me, did you?”

“I did,” Aziraphale says, smiling gently.  “For a very long time.”  He takes the demon’s hot, damp hands in his own.  “Let’s go back to the bookshop.”

“Right.  Right.” Crowley coughs.  “Right.”

“I have a Bordeaux that would be quite to your liking.”

“Hnngh.  Right. Yes.”

“Do you mind if we walk?  I’ll cover you if the rain gets worse.”

“I know you will.”

“Of course.  Let’s be off, dear.”

“Lead the way, angel.”


	13. Road-trip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley go to America.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on a Tumblr prompt from art-takes-time: Can you do a fic for the road trip prompt?
> 
> (I'm sorry this is so so so cheesy.)

When they are finally properly married, Crowley insists they go on a honeymoon.

“It’s tradition,” he says, firmly.  “Otherwise, the marriage could be annulled.”

Aziraphale skews him a skeptical glance over the top of his book.  “I think we quite thoroughly dispelled that possibility, Crowley.  Multiple times.  In swift succession.”

For a moment, Crowley must make a heroic effort not to get distracted by fond memories.  “Still,” he soldiers on, “the honeymoon is paramount.  Think of all the places we could go.”  Aziraphale dithers, looking like a turtle that’s been asked to vacate its shell, and he adds, “All the food you could eat.”

Aziraphale lowers his book and narrows his eyes with grudging curiosity. “What… where did you want to go, precisely?”

“Somewhere far away,” Crowley says.  This path must be navigated with care, not a foot out of place, or Aziraphale will refuse in a heartbeat.  “Somewhere with wide spaces and open roads and—and grand vistas.”

Aziraphale raises the book again in a pointed manner.  “If you aren’t going to come out and say it, the answer is no.”

“Apple pie,” Crowley says, relentlessly.  “Sourdough bread, biscuits and gravy, gumbo, lobster…”

“Out with it, Crowley.”

_“Beignets.”_

Aziraphale winces as that well-aimed missile punches through the chink in his armor.  “I’ve never cared for the colonies.”

“Think of it,” Crowley insists, gently slipping his hands around the angel’s wrists, tugging them down.  Aziraphale scowls, lips pursed.  Crowley leans in until the tips of their noses touch.  “A road trip holiday.  Could be fun.”

“I grow weary of your wiles, old serpent,” Aziraphale mumbles, and kisses him, the stern line of his mouth already softening. 

-

In the end, Crowley suspects it’s the beignets that did it.  Aziraphale acquiesces, provided they make a stop in New Orleans. “For the history, of course.”

“Of course,” Crowley says, because he knows when how to quit when he’s ahead. He’s curious about the Voodoo scene, anyway.

-

It is, broadly speaking, a road trip.  But when the only two occupants in the car (the Bentley, of course, miracled over the Pond in a staggering feat of occult power) are ethereal and infernal beings, roads as they appear on the map are more like friendly guidelines than concrete (or asphalt) rules.  The road goes where Aziraphale and Crowley want it to go, and the time on the road lasts exactly as long as it takes them to wonder, _are we there yet?_

Aziraphale has acquired what is perhaps the world’s last disposable camera.  He’s very proud of this technological wonder,  _Isn’t it amazing, Crowley?  Look, you simply wind the dial and—_

Crowley puts on an exasperated front, but he is secretly quite proud of the angel.  Disposable cameras are roughly twenty years out of date, which is a fair sight newer than Aziraphale’s typical fifty. 

It’s the little things, he decides, and flashes a sardonic smile when Aziraphale points the camera at him. 

-

In New York City, they attend a Broadway musical about one of the nation’s Founding Fathers.  Aziraphale is initially skeptical – _oh, I don’t know about this, it’s nothing like Sondheim –_ but by the end of the first act, he is leaning forward in his seat, eyes rapt on the stage.  By the middle of the second act, he is weeping. Crowley threads his fingers into Aziraphale’s, thumb rubbing over his knuckles. 

Their last stop in New York City is at the Statue of Liberty.  They stare up at her, disconcerted; towering, beautiful, pitiless, she bears a distinct resemblance to Someone Else they both know. 

-

In Maine, Aziraphale gorges himself, cracking open lobster claws with the sort of zeal Michael reserves for smiting demons.  Crowley watches, tension mixed with gut-molten wanting, as the angel luxuriates in the tender flesh greasing his fingers and lips.  The demon’s mind is a welter of temptation and sin, and he cannot wait until he gets his husband back to their lodgings. 

-

In South Dakota – of all places! – they stop at Wall Drug.  After seeing all the signs peppering the highway, they couldn't  _not_ stop at Wall Drug.

“Well,” Crowley mutters, “this is a distinct disappointment.”

“I think I recall you inventing this,” Aziraphale says. 

“Nah.  I never.”

“You did.  We were very drunk.”

Crowley huffs a sigh.  “Had to’ve been.  I can’t decide if I’m proud or ashamed.”

“Oh, I don’t know.  It does have a… a quaint, folksy charm, if you will.”

“Nnngh.”

“Oh, look!” Aziraphale points.  “That giant horned rabbit fellow.  You can take pictures sitting on it.”

“Angel, I swear to G—to _Somebody—”_

But Aziraphale has already swanned off to pester a pair of tourists, waving his disposable camera in their faces.  After a blank moment of studying the ancient technology, one tourist nods. Aziraphale drags Crowley over and pats the jackalope’s white rump.  “Up you pop.”

“I will kill you for this,” Crowley vows through gritted teeth.

His anger is short-lived, for Aziraphale scrambles up behind him and winds his arms about Crowley’s waist.  The demon tries valiantly to glare at the camera, but – feeling Aziraphale snug against him, comfortable and ridiculous and radiantly happy – he can only muster a little frown. 

-

They expect to be in New Orleans at some point, and so they are, geography be damned.  Aziraphale, to his credit, remembers his excuses about history and leads Crowley through the French Quarter.  He murmurs his appreciation at the colorful buildings, the intricate latticeworks of the balconies, the ghosts and shades steeping the very pavement beneath their feet. The air is a fug of garlic, seared sausage smoke, and sautéed vegetables.  Occult energy sings through the city, the magic a spice on Crowley’s tongue.

Aziraphale turns into the first café they come across and orders a plateful of beignets.  Crowley watches, later, as the angel licks fry grease and powdered sugar off his fingers. Later still, as they leave the café to wander the streets under humid starlight, Crowley tugs Aziraphale into a quiet alleyway and presses him up against the bricks.  He kisses him, tastes the sweetness of his lips, his mouth.

-

They go to the Grand Canyon.  Staring out across the vast expanse, Crowley suddenly feels very old and very small. But the look of amazement on Aziraphale’s face is well worth the reminder. 

“It’s so… Oh, it’s just so…”

“Grand?”

Aziraphale gives him a quelling look.  “Yes, all right, be flippant.”

“I would never." 

Aziraphale purses his lips, but his gaze softens as he studies Crowley.  “Thank you.  For all your wiling.”

“Knew you’d like it,” Crowley grumbles, aiming for surly.  Sounding simply besotted. 

Aziraphale takes Crowley’s hand.  The brush of his lips on Crowley’s palm is a blessing, an offering, the sweetest pain Crowley can fathom. 

-

In San Francisco, they go for cookies in the Castro District.  Crowley, who has been sneezing and sniffling ever since they set foot in the city, is marginally cheered by the sight of Aziraphale with an extremely phallic macaroon cookie.  Bless him, the angel even ordered one with white chocolate and red sprinkles on the scrotum. 

 _I love him,_ Crowley thinks, helplessly, as Aziraphale tucks in.

-

When they arrive back in London, Aziraphale finds perhaps the last shop on the planet that will send disposable cameras out for development.  The angel expects the pictures to be beautiful, and so they are – exquisitely shot, each vividly colorful, each of a resolution that would make Sony and Nikon and Apple weep with envy.  He puts them in a scrapbook, carefully labeled “Our Travels” in block letters, and gives it to Crowley for their first anniversary. 

 An inscription adorns the inside cover.  _‘To my husband,’_ it says.  _‘I look forward to seeing all the wonders of the world with you.’_


	14. Reeds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Ancient Egypt, Crawley finds Aziraphale in the midst of great sorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr prompt from vvcorvusvv:  
> "I was reading the prompt list you reblogged and thought 17 would be interesting to see play out. Especially in an older setting, when Az and Crowley aren't as comfortable with each other. Maybe using the deleted scene of Az opening the bookshop? Though I'm sure you could make the modern setting just as enjoyable"
> 
> 17\. Setting Prompt: accidental baby acquisition
> 
> Warnings for some disturbing imagery and mention of suicide.

The moment Crawley enters the Egyptian city of Pi Ramesses, he knows something is deeply wrong. 

It clots the air, a miasma of anguish so choking it sets him back on his heels.  As angels are attuned to the divine emotions – love, joy, contentment – so demons are to the infernal, the sorrow, the wrath, the hate.  It is a sense not unlike smell or taste, and the grief billowing downwind from the Nile carries distinct notes of death and rot. His camel arches its neck in alarm and he tightens his grip on the reins.  Bile sours the back of his throat.  To his knowledge, Hell played no part in this, which means…

Crawley is about to turn his camel around and flee when a fresh wave of grief barrels into him.  This one is entirely different from the rest – a glacial knife of shock and sorrow.  Crawley recognizes the divine imprint of that grief.  He hesitates.  His tongue darts out, viper-swift, and tastes the faintest trace of apples.

“Blast,” he mutters, and flicks the reins.  The camel plods into the heart of Pi Ramesses. 

It takes time, winding through the narrow streets, chasing the elusive taste of apples.  Crawley counts himself lucky the angel did not linger long in the city, did not trace and re-trace the maze of dusty pathways, leaving his scent everywhere, impossible to track.  But his relief withers as the scent leads him through the Egyptian quarter – clean, quiet, untainted by grief – and toward the slave ghetto.  The two neighborhoods are separated by shallow decline of sandstone and a stretch of bare earth. 

Crawley halts his camel at the top of the hill.  If he stretches his senses, he can just catch them:  scraps of wailing and screaming, babies crying. Whispers beside the tidal grief crashing over him. 

And there it is again:  the angel’s sorrow, cold dread. 

Setting his jaw, Crawley guides the camel down the hillside and across the empty land.  The lamentations grow louder as the distance shrinks, the raw clamor of emotion very nearly overwhelming.  Every tendon in Crawley’s body is strung tight as he urges the camel into the melee, cursing the beast for its good sense to be afraid, cursing himself for being fool enough to keep going.  As he moves through the ghetto, chasing the trail, screams and sobs assail him.  They come from the homes, little more than clay hovels, and bleed shrieking into the streets. 

Crawley drags the camel to a stop as, scant yards ahead, an Egyptian man emerges from one of the hovels.  A screaming baby is slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain.  A woman chases him, eyes streaming, face contorted in a rictus of horror.  The man backhands her and she staggers against the wall of the hovel, dazed. 

Crawley doesn’t think – only reacts, hand flying up to pluck a shred of infernal power from Below.  The Egyptian’s eyes glaze over and he slumps, topples.  Crawley snatches the baby from his limp grasp the moment before he hits the ground.  A boy, mere weeks old, maybe less.

“Take this,” he snarls in Hebrew, shoving the baby into his mother’s unsteady hands.  “And get out!”

He forges onward, horror prickling at his insides as the truth of the situation sinks in.  Boys, all baby boys.  Boys held aloft by their legs, thrown over shoulders, ripped from their mothers’ arms. Babies screaming in uncomprehending, instinctual terror.  He helps where he can, throwing miracles like sparks cast off a flame, but the Egyptians are endless.  He may as well fight the ocean with a guttering candle.  

Crawley sucks in a breath as the camel rushes out an alleyway and into a clearing beside the Nile.  In the burnished light of the sinking sun, the water runs a carnal red.  Reeds crowd the riverbank, swaying in a placid breeze.  For the briefest instant, Crawley’s focus is fixed on the reeds:  the peaceful, hollow rattle of husk on husk.

And then the scene crashes over him in a torrent of grief.  A woman lies inert on the shore, arms tangled over her head. Her face is turned toward the sky, splattered with red clay-mud, eyes fixed sightlessly on the inkblot twilight. The neckline of her shift is dark with congealing blood.  A pair of children stand beside her, a boy and a girl.  The boy is sobbing, great, heaving wails that seem wrenched out of him with every gulping breath.  The girl simply stares.  She is beyond tears. 

Crawley casts his gaze out across the Nile and sees him:  Aziraphale, standing waist-deep in the water just beyond the reeds. The angel has a dark bundle cradled in his arms. 

Crawley clicks his tongue and the camel trudges forward.  As they near the riverbank, the demon slips off the camel’s back and lands with a wince.  With a snap of his fingers, the children are frozen in time.

Mud sucks at Crawley’s sandals as he stops, stiff-legged, on the edge of the Nile.  “Aziraphale!”

The angel startles as if from a daze.  Turning slowly, Aziraphale regards him.  “Oh.  Crawley.”

“Get over here, you great fool,” Crawley calls.  He doesn’t know why he bothers, doesn’t let himself dwell on it.  “Hurry, before—”

His words are drowned in a rush as the waters of the Nile mound up around Aziraphale, snapping apart in a cascade of droplets.  The maw of a crocodile appears, scything the water with horrible speed, teeth bared to ruin and rend.  Aziraphale fumbles with the bundle only to bend double when it threatens to slip out of his arms.  The crocodile speeds closer and Crawley’s heart leaps into his throat.  Aziraphale pries an arm free and raises his hand to pluck down a miracle from Above.

A _snap_ reverberates through the air. The crocodile collapses sideways in a shower of water, submerged.  When it resurfaces, it has become a piece of driftwood, hollow and termite-ridden and floating fast downstream.  It may return to crocodile-shaped before it reaches the delta.  If it remembers to. 

Aziraphale, still clutching the bundle, stares at Crawley in disbelief.  “You…”

Crawley lowers his hand, fingers still smarting with infernal power.  He can’t begin to fathom why he just did that.  Clearing his throat, he calls, “Get out of the river, angel.  Before another one comes along.”

Nodding, still dazed, Aziraphale trudges toward the bank.  The bundle in his arms resolves into a basket of reeds and pitch, slick as fish scales.  The angel steps onshore, his linen kilt soaked through.  Crawley averts his eyes.  “Miracle yourself dry, for pity’s sake.”

“Oh.”  Aziraphale shuffles the basket in his arms, which emits a faint whimpering noise. Crawley’s heart sinks.  Growing impatient, he snaps his fingers – no sense in subtlety at this point – and Aziraphale sucks in a breath as the water purls off his skin, out of his kilt.  “Um. Thank you, Crawley.”

“What’s that,” Crawley demands, eyeing the basket. 

Aziraphale’s blank expression crumples into sorrow.  Crawley winces, stung by the keen chill of it.  He extends his empty hands.  The angel surrenders the basket with infinite care. 

Crawley lifts the lid and hisses out a curse.  A baby boy lies inside, damp and grizzling but overall unharmed.  The basket was clearly made with care, bound tightly with twine, each gap stoppered with pitch.  The love imbued between the reeds stings Crawley’s hands.  He darts a glance toward the three humans, still frozen. 

“It’s hers,” he surmises, meaning the dead woman. 

Aziraphale’s voice is low, quavering.  “Yes… yes, he is.”  He swallows. “Was.”

“What happened?”

The angel drags in a shuddering breath.  “She tried to escape.  Been hiding the child for months, apparently.  Her plan was to… to hide the baby in the reeds until the Egyptians left, but…”  His eyes dart to the mud, to the red rush of the river.  Anywhere but to meet Crawley’s gaze.  “An Egyptian man saw her and…”  He gestures, helplessly, eyes flitting skyward.  “I sent him away.  I couldn’t… couldn’t kill him.”

Crawley can hear the words beneath the words, whisper-soft:  _I wish I was strong enough to._

He buries his pity.  “This madness had better not be your lot’s doing.”  He means it to be bitter as gall, but the words emerge a plea.  He thinks of lashing rain, pillars of salt. 

Aziraphale tenses.  Blinking hard, he shakes his head.  “It wasn’t.  It couldn’t have been.”

 _You don’t know,_ Crawley thinks, but holds his tongue.  The world is still new, still an infant bobbing helplessly along in the current of time, and he has not yet exhausted the endless quirks of his human body, but he knows what is it to weep.  If Aziraphale hasn’t learned that yet, he is about to. 

“I see,” he says.  “But why…?”

“Pharaoh was worried the Hebrews would become too strong,” Aziraphale says. He lowers a finger into the basket, touches the baby’s brow.  The whimpering infant subsides into sleep at once.  “So he… h-he…”

Another wave of anguish rolls off the angel, nearly dragging Crawley into its icy depths.  Shuddering, he gathers the basket closer, pressing the sting of love to his chest. “Humans always find ways to outdo us, don’t they.”

His thoughts are on the Flood and they pour into his voice, fouling the words. Aziraphale’s mouth flattens in a grim line that belies his unshed tears.  “They… they had done wrong, that time.  God was angry with them.”

“Just like She was angry with Sodom and Gomorrah,” Crawley volleys back.  “Yes, I’m sure they all deserved to die.  Just like those babies in the river.”

Aziraphale flinches as if struck.  Crawley’s fingers bite into the reed hull of the basket and he steels himself. Regret sits rancid in his belly.  He hadn’t wanted to hurt the angel, not really, but if he hadn’t uttered the words, hadn’t come up for breath, the noxious cacophony of memories swirling between them would have choked him. 

“Angel,” he begins.

But Aziraphale has already unfurled his wings, a hard light battering back the misery in his eyes.  “God has plans for that child,” he says, beating his wings in a gust of mud and grit. “If you don’t want to be destroyed, I would counsel you leave well enough alone, _fiend.”_

He is gone before Crawley can reply, rising into the sky and winking out of sight.  The cold aura of his sorrow lingers, burrowing into Crawley’s bones.  The demon rises, basket held close, and approaches the reeds.  As he lays the basket in the water and urges the current to carry him someplace safe, a sense of loss worms its way inside him.  It makes a home, hollows him out. 

He goes to the frozen family and stares down at the woman.  She must have been alive mere minutes ago.  Her hands bent the reeds, tied the twine, laid the pitch.  Crawley wishes he could breathe life into her.  Animals and plants he can do, but a human life is beyond his power to reclaim. 

Crawley kneels before the children and snaps his fingers, restoring time. The girl stares at him with mute shock.

“You will forget this,” Crawley intones, “and come with me.”

-

Later, there will be whispers in the slave ghetto about Jochebed and her children.

The whispers will say this:  that Jochebed was forever changed after the Egyptians came for the baby boys on that terrible day. 

This would, in itself, be unsurprising.  Every woman who felt her child torn from her arms to be given to the Nile was ripped in two, that day, never to be whole again. That was the way of the Egyptian masters – they took you apart, piece by piece by precious piece, and found still more to crush underfoot. 

But Jochebed was changed beyond that.  Oh, she was still Jochebed, to be sure.  But after that day, a peculiar witchlight entered her eyes, a gleam that seemed almost golden if you looked at it right.  A predator’s stare, one that dared its foes to threaten her or her children. A serpent’s stare, always coiled on the verge of striking. 

Her children were changed, too.  After that day, her son Aaron grew sharper, always ready with a quip, always dropping pithy pieces of knowledge like grains of sand in his cupped palms. Silvertongued and keen, his wit surpassed even that of the Pharaoh’s counselors.  And then there was Miriam, whose singing could coax asps to lay pliant in her hands.  She had a songbird’s voice and light, dancing feet, and her mind sheared holes in the fabric of the universe to wheedle out its secrets.  _Prophetess,_ they would call her.  One day.

The baby boy was restored to Jochebed for a time to be nursed.  When Pharaoh’s men came to take the baby to his new home, the whispers say Jochebed wept.  But none dared ask her if it was true. 

And when the time came – when Aaron and Miriam were grown, able to fend for themselves and care for one another – Jochebed vanished.  The whispers say she took herself off to the Nile, as had so many other mothers who lost their sons.  No body was found, but that was common enough – the crocodiles were always waiting, always hungry. 

The baby boy – Moses, he was named – has a story all his own.  But that is a tale for another time. 


	15. Pop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things pop. Two times out of three, Aziraphale winds up injured.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on a Tumblr prompt from fuckingnonions: "Let me pop it, just let me pop it, nothing bad will happen, I swear!"

**Blister**

“C’mon,” Crowley says, inching closer with a hand outstretched.  “Let me pop it.  Just let me pop it.”

Aziraphale recoils as if the hand is a white-hot brand.  “Absolutely  _not.”_

“Angel.”  Crowley rocks back on his heels with a pout.  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

The little color remaining in Aziraphale’s face drains.  “It could fall off.  I could have  _leprosy,_  Crowley.  I could—”

“Couldn’t you just miracle yourself well?” Crowley cuts in.  

The angel rolls his eyes.  “I suppose so, yes, but it’s still distasteful.  All those miniscule bugs multiplying under my skin, making my corporation fall apart…”

“Are they really bugs, though?  I thought they were more like germs.”

“I fail to see why pedantry is relevant at this juncture.”  Aziraphale can hear his own voice pitching closer to hysterics, but he can’t help himself. 

Crowley arches a quizzical eyebrow.  “I’d think, as an angel, you’d be quite keen on getting the  _why_  of it right.  People nowadays think leprosy is punishment for deadly sins.”

Aziraphale flicks him a withering look, though if he’s perfectly honest with himself, annoyance is preferable to the incessant worry his finger might rot and fall off.  He turns his attention back to the lesion on his knuckle.  The skin has been shiny and ballooned taut for the past day and a half, having appeared after he helped an old beggar push his cart down a road.  It doesn’t hurt when he prods it, and isn’t that one of the signs of leprosy?  That particular nastiness has been plaguing the humans for years.  Nothing short of divine intervention will cure it.   Not for a few thousand years, at least.  Aziraphale has seen leprosy first-hand: the festering, the rot, the disfigurement.  Worst of all is the way the disease makes humans turn on one another, forcing the poor, ill souls into dark places so they might die unnoticed.  

“I don’t think it’s that,” Crowley says.  The gentleness in his tone catches Aziraphale off-guard.  His fingers are light and dry as they fold over the angel’s wrist, barely a ghost of touch.  With one forefinger, he traces an oval around the perimeter of the lesion, mapping its bounds.  

Aziraphale’s breath catches.  Odd, this – he had thought, after two thousand years, that he knew every trick and quirk of his body.  But this snap of nerves to attention, the prickling as the hairs on the back of his neck rise – those are new. 

And then, quicker than a striking serpent, Crowley’s fingernail springs into a claw, long and thin and wickedly sharp.  Aziraphale shrieks, more out of surprise than pain, as the lesion pops in a spurt of pus. 

He doesn’t speak to Crowley for a good decade after that.  In hindsight, he considers it an act of charity on par with the works of Mother Theresa that he didn’t discorporate the demon on the spot.

It wasn’t leprosy, of course.  But Aziraphale never tells Crowley that.  He won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he was right.

 

**Champagne**

“To the—to Armag…”  Crowley trails off, blinking slowly as he tries to align his brain and his tongue.  After attempting the word ‘Armageddon’ with varying levels of failure, he settles on, “To th’world not ending!”

“Wahoo,” Aziraphale says.  He raises his empty glass, furrows his brow, and refills it with a thought. 

Crowley swaggers across the bookshop floor with a bottle in each hand.  His sunglasses are perched at a rakish angle atop his head.  “’Ave you seen my glasses?”

“Nnnnno,” Aziraphale says, fighting a smile.  He loves Crowley’s eyes unmasked, and it occurs to him to say as much, because why the devil wouldn’t he?  “I adore your eyes, dear boy.”

Crowley halts so abruptly Aziraphale fears the momentum will spill him off his feet.  His eyes are wide, all the better to admire their molten hue.  Aziraphale sits back on the sofa and drinks in the sight of him.  For all he wears his human skin like a glove, he is still a serpent of Hell, sinuous slants and the red-gold shine of fireheart.  

Crowley watches Aziraphale watching him and averts his gaze.  The demon’s face is flushed, though that could be put down to the extraordinary amount of wine he’s drunk.  “Ngk.  Thank.  Thanks.”

“I do think they look better on you than me,” Aziraphale says, mostly kindly but with just the faintest hint of relish, because flustering Crowley is terribly fun.  “Though I maintain the tartan collar was an improvement.”

Crowley scoffs and sways over to a shelf.  He leaves a bottle of cabernet sauvignon beside an envious-looking O. Henry anthology and snaps his fingers, miracling the second bottle from a Bordeaux to a champagne.  “A toast!” he declares.  “To th’world!”

Aziraphale is overcome with a sudden, vicious affection for the demon.  He stumbles upright and staggers over to him.  Lifting his glass, he drains the contents in three heroic gulps, goaded on by Crowley’s admiring whistle. “Lesshave some—some bubbly,” he titters.  “To the world!”

It is a well-known fact that angels and demons derive a significant portion of their power from imagination.  That is how Crowley was able to drive the Bentley through a wall of Hellfire which should, by all accounts, have discorporated him.  It’s how Aziraphale was able to escape Heaven and possess Madame Tracy.  Simply put, with enough willpower and expectation, the two could have moved the Earth. 

A cork in a champagne bottle is nothing beside those feats.  And Crowley, who has seen his share of corks popping out of bottles on television, expects theirs to do the same.

And so it does.

Aziraphale yelps as he cork strikes him squarely in the forehead and obliterates the world in a shower of stars. When he comes to, sometime later, he finds himself flat on his back, the room spinning a drunken pirouette.  Crowley sits beside him, sober as a stone and shaking with nerves.

“Is it bad?” Aziraphale mumbles.  He winces as his own voice reverberates through his throbbing skull.

Crowley stammers an incoherent reply and touches his fingertips to Aziraphale’s brow.  The pain eases instantly.  “M’sorry, angel.”

Aziraphale covers Crowley’s hand with his.  “Oh, don’t fret.  We’ll do a proper toast next time.”

 _We have time,_  he doesn’t say, but he doesn’t need to.  Crowley smiles.  He understands.

 

**The Question**

When, several years later, Crowley gets down on one knee in the garden behind their South Downs cottage, he pops the question without fanfare.  There are no injuries – no pus, no goose-egged brows.  There is just the two of them, together in the home they’ve made, in the world they have cherished since its infancy. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale breathes.  “What…”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a long time, angel.”  Crowley’s voice is solemn, reverential.  His hands clasp Aziraphale’s close to his chest, as if to press his fingerprints into his heart.  Aziraphale nods.  His every nerve is a lit fuse of anticipation.

Crowley draws a slow, shuddering breath and asks, “How many nipples have you got?”

Aziraphale swats him lightly on the shoulder as he laughs.  “As if you wouldn’t know, you old fiend!”

Later, lying in bed, they tangle their fingers together and listen to the first raindrops of a summer storm pelting the windowpane.  Aziraphale’s eyes droop as he sinks toward slumber.  It’s a habit he’s picked up from Crowley, one of the hundred hundred seashell fragments of their new life together.  A treasure he never dared imagine he might have.

“I mean it, you know,” Crowley murmurs.  “If you’ll have me.”

Aziraphale tightens his grip on the demon’s fingers.  “I should make you wait a century.  Just to spite you.”

Crowley’s mouth twists, but he only sighs, fear bleeding through put-upon weariness.  “I’ll wait.  Makes no difference to me, long as we get there in the end.”

“We will,” Aziraphale assures him, kissing the thin line of his mouth.  “Whenever you like, my dear.  We’ll get there.”


	16. Channel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stuck in the middle of Scotland on pointless missions, Aziraphale and Crowley find themselves at odds over what to watch on the telly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr prompt from piestrudel: “change the channel and I’ll kill you” omfg I’d love to see you write this if you want to!

The Bed & Breakfast on the edge of Loch Lomond is a quaint place, with a stone façade garnished in creeping ivy and forests carpeting the hillsides in lush green.  It drizzles near-constantly, and when it doesn’t, a seeping gray mist clings in the air, smears the edges of the world into obscurity. 

Crowley disembarks from the Bentley and glares down at his shoes, which have acquired a thick coating of mud.  Aziraphale gestures to his own poncho and wellies.  “I did tell you.”

“Yes, all right,” Crowley grouses, “don’t get too smug.  You hardly need to be a prophet to predict rain in Scotland.” He drags their luggage out of the car – a sleek, black, ultra-light, hard-shell carry-on for himself and an ancient, battered leather holdall for Aziraphale – and squelches toward the B&B. Aziraphale follows, not making a sound but somehow managing to be very loudly smug nonetheless. 

They are both in the boonies of Scotland for Official Purposes, at least… well, officially.  Crowley isn’t certain, and at this point, he’s too nervous to ask, but he still seems to be on Hell’s payroll, still able to summon miracles.  The oversight has been lax, which is unusual – the stress of keeping employees under constant, impossible deadlines is grease to the very gears of Hell – but Crowley stills receives missives now and then.  After his and Aziraphale’s ruse worked so well, it almost seems churlish to shirk them. 

Aziraphale is operating under the same circumstances and seems just as baffled about the whole thing.  “Apparently, I’m to turn one of the tenants toward the light.  A disaffected priest.  It all seems rather…”

“Dull?”

Aziraphale purses his lips.  “Well.  _Yes._  Perhaps it sounds, oh, I don’t know, silly, but I thought once Upstairs had finally got over their fear, they would send me proper work again.”

“They aren’t over their fear,” Crowley says, flat.  “They’ll never be over it.  Best get used to this busywork, angel.  No more Antichrist-level clearance for us.”

Aziraphale sighs and shrugs, scattering raindrops.  “I suppose you’re right.”

“If it’s any consolation, I’m meant to be tempting a group of tourists to get high off their tits in the middle of the woods.  Not like this work is worth an ounce of virgin’s blood.”

Aziraphale shoots him a dubious look.  “You don’t really still use… use _that_ as currency, do you?”

“Nah.  Tough to find, these days.”  A smirk. “Though not as tough as you’d think.”

He both regrets and exalts in the words as soon as they leave his lips, for they make the angel flush a delicate, peachy pink that goes rather fetchingly up to the roots of his hair.  Aziraphale coughs and picks up his pace, squelching determinedly up to the front door of the B&B.  The demon trails him at a safe distance.

“Sorry,” the receptionist says, distinctly unapologetic, “but all the doubles are booked up.”

“Of course they are,” Crowley grumbles.  Aziraphale less-than-discreetly elbows him in the ribs.

“We have a single if that suits,” the receptionist says.  She eyes them in a pointed manner.  “Queen bed.”

“That will do splendidly, dear girl,” Aziraphale oozes.  “Thank you.”

Minutes later, Crowley clicks down the handle of his carry-on and flops onto the bed with a sigh of bone-deep weariness.  Aziraphale dithers in the doorway, eyes darting between the expansive bed and the musty, flower-patterned armchair squatting in the corner of the room. “Well, I suppose I can take the chair, since… since you’ve gotten into the habit, of course.”

“If you like,” Crowley says.  He has the sense of skirting the cusp of an event horizon, the inescapable pluck of gravity.  It’s the same sense that’s been dogging him for months, now, always around Aziraphale. He takes off his sunglasses and stares at the ceiling, picking out pock-marks in the plaster.  “Makes no difference to me.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale mumbles, “yes, of course.”

They settle into a silence, a thin veneer of ordinariness layered over oppressive tension.  Crowley has known Aziraphale for six millennia – he’s shared companionable silences with the angel before, and this is most certainly _not_ companionable.  He’s too aware of the angel, seated in the armchair with an open book and his spectacles perched on the end of his nose.  The awareness claws at his nerves, itches like too-tight snakeskin. He needs something to do.

A television sits on the dresser opposite the bed, and with a snap of his fingers, Crowley powers it on.  He has a particular show in mind, something that never fails to set his nerves at ease. Four familiar faces appear onscreen as Crowley sits up, propping his back against the headboard. 

_“Better late than… Blanche!”_

_“Pregnant!”_

“What,” Aziraphale asks, “is that?”

“The Golden Girls.”  Crowley snaps his fingers again to bring up the volume.  “You’d like it.  It’s passive-aggressive and catty.”

Aziraphale harrumphs and glares at his book.  “I’m sure I don’t know _what_ you mean.”

Crowley smirks and turns his attention back to the television, eager to wipe his mind clean for a time.  If he can just get through this weekend, accomplish this little temptation, and get back on the road to London before he can dwell on Aziraphale’s proximity, his _everything—_ then, then everything will be all right. 

“Is everything all right, Crowley?”

“Hmm?  What?”

Aziraphale’s eyes dart from Crowley’s to the bed.  “You’re going to rip the duvet.”

“What?” Crowley repeats, stupidly, and looks down.  His hands are fisted tightly in the bedclothes.  “O-oh.”  He eases them free, knuckles creaking under the strain.  “Didn’t notice.”

Aziraphale cocks his head.  “You’re quite certain you’re all right?”

“Yes, yes.”  Crowley waves a smarting hand.  “Fine. Absolutely fine.”

Aziraphale hums and looks back at his book.  Several minutes elapse before, without having turned a page, the angel sighs and closes it.  “Oh, phooey.”

“I can turn it down,” Crowley offers with a nod to The Golden Girls.

“No, don’t bother,” Aziraphale sighs.  “I can’t concentrate anyway.”  Setting the book aside, he stands and walks toward the bed.  Crowley is suddenly, intensely aware of the angel’s soft footsteps drawing closer, but he only hovers beside the mattress, studying the screen and wringing his hands.  “So, this is one of the latest fads, is it?  On one of those, ah, currenting devices?”

“Streaming,” Crowley mumbles.  “And this one is over thirty years old, so.  Close enough.”

Aziraphale hums and sits on the edge of the bed, eyes still fixed on the screen.  Crowley sets his teeth and wills his speeding heart to a normal pace, _behave yourself, for Someone’s sake,_ but the tight confinement of his own skin is suddenly too uncomfortable to ignore.  He sits ramrod-straight, every muscle and tendon rigid. With Aziraphale’s back to him, he has an unobstructed view of the angel’s nape, the hair curling there, damp from the rain.  The impulse to set his lips to that spot – to taste the thrum of Aziraphale’s pulse – shivers through him.

“I do like her,” Aziraphale says, turning to look at Crowley as he points at Rose. 

Crowley, momentarily startled out of his reverie, nods.  “Most do.”

“But this whole thing is quite… well, sordid, isn’t it?”  Aziraphale lifts a hand.  “If I could just…”

“Angel,” Crowley cuts in, because there is a line, an Aziraphale is not _crossing it_ so much as _soaring over it in a flying scooter exceeding the speed of sound._ Crowley has always liked The Golden Girls, and just now, he needs to be comfortingly distracted until he feels less like his own body is bent on suffocating him.  “If you change the channel, I will discorporate you.”

Aziraphale lowers his hand with a sour look.  “Now, there’s no need to get snippy.” 

“Don’t come between a demon and Betty White.  Go back to your book if you find this so intolerable.”

“I can’t.”  Aziraphale looks at him, all huge, piteous eyes.  “I can’t focus, I’ve been so—”  And then he clams up, a flush creeping up his neck. 

“You’ve been so what?” Crowley asks.

“Nothing.”

“Really?”  Dogged, vicious.  “You’re sure?”

_“Yes.”_

“Well, then.”  Crowley snaps his fingers again, bringing up the volume by a few notches out of sheer spite. “If you’ve got nothing to say…”

Aziraphale stands, fists clenched at his sides, and strides over to the dresser. He fumbles the remote control out of a drawer and waves it with an aura of tetchy victory.  Sitting primly back on the bed, he shoots a vindictive smile over his shoulder.  “Let’s see what runs out first, shall we?  The battery or your dispensation for miracles.”

“Oi.”  Crowley unfolds from his seat and crawls across the mattress on hands and knees. He slinks an arm over Aziraphale’s shoulder, aiming to seize the remote, but the angel yanks it just out of reach. “Aziraphale!  Give it here.”

“Absolutely not,” Aziraphale retorts, jabbing at buttons.  The channel changes twice before the screen goes dark, then comes abruptly back to life.  Still angling to get the remote, Crowley snaps his fingers with his free hand. The Golden Girls comes back on in a roar of live-audience guffaws.  Aziraphale squirms as Crowley gets an arm around him, fingers crabbing over a plump forearm as he tries to pin down his hand.  Under different circumstances – circumstances in which Crowley wasn’t six millennia gone on Aziraphale and about to burst out of his skin with wanting for him – Crowley might have enjoyed the experience.  Aziraphale is soft and solid and warm.  And _Hell, he smells good._  

Aziraphale must finally realize he has two arms with which to play keep-away, because he switches the remote from the hand Crowley is trying to pin down to the other.  Hissing an oath, Crowley throws his other arm around the angel’s middle and yanks him bodily back, digging his heels into the mattress.  Aziraphale tips back with a yelp and lands atop the demon.  Crowley grunts as a wayward elbow catches him in the ribs, driving the air from his lungs. 

“Oh, Crowley, I’m so—”  Aziraphale rolls off Crowley and shuffles closer on his knees.  “I’m so sorry, are you…”

He trails off with a sharp breath.  Wincing, Crowley opens his eyes. Aziraphale’s face hovers above his, eyes wide, lips slightly parted.  The angel blinks and lurches back a fraction.  His hand comes to rest on the mattress beside Crowley’s head, fingers tangling in the duvet.  “I’m—I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over…”

And here’s the thing:  Crowley has done a lot of tempting over the past six-thousand years.  He’s orchestrated hundreds of tantalizing scenarios, wiled his way into the darkest corners of the human heart.  Manipulating scenarios is part of the job – shifted road markers here, a particularly sumptuous apple there.  You don’t build up a resume like Crowley’s without knowing your business. 

Crowley isn’t responsible for this scenario, but he can sense some unseen hand pulling the strings, moving the pieces.  He doesn’t like being manipulated – doesn’t like it at all. But for his money, if there’s going to be Hell to pay for an apple eaten, you may as well savor the first crisp, juicy bite.

Crowley curls his fingers around Aziraphale’s wrist with one hand and reaches up to cup the nape of his neck with the other.  He leans up even as he tugs Aziraphale down to slant their lips together.  The kiss is supple and honey-sweet, broken too soon.  Aziraphale draws back in stunned silence.

“Angel.”  Crowley props himself up on his elbows, buzzing with frantic fear.  _Too fast, too fast, too fast._   “Angel, I’m so sorr—”

Aziraphale reaches for him, a fierce, frightened look in his eyes, a determined set to his jaw, but his hands are gentle, _so gentle_ as they cup Crowley’s face and draw him in again.  Crowley sighs into the kiss as tension unspools from his muscles, warmth melting through him.  It’s like sunlight on his scales, like the fresh, unsullied air of the garden, like the first iron scent of rain.  Crowley clings to it, clings to Aziraphale.  He winds an arm around the angel’s waist, anchoring himself, while the other comes up to tangle and tug in blonde curls.  Aziraphale makes a noise against his mouth, a breathy little moan, and the warmth flares into a hungry tongue of flame.  Crowley arches his back, suddenly desperate to be closer, _closer,_ and Aziraphale is breathing hard past the slide of their lips, one hand slipping down from Crowley’s face to move over his chest, down, down to the hem of his shirt.  Crowley shudders at the barely-there tracery of the angel’s fingers, a touch he wants bruised into his skin.  He breaks the kiss to set his teeth to the angel’s neck, keen on leaving a mark.  An imprint of himself.

Behind Aziraphale, the glow of the television sharpens.  A spark of infernal energy trips through the air and Crowley tenses.  Aziraphale, feeling it, stiffens.  “Crowley, what—”

“Get down,” Crowley chokes out.  He throws his weight sideways, bodily shoving Aziraphale off the bed in a yelp and a _thump_ of angel meeting the floor. Onscreen, Betty White furrows her brow in confusion. 

“Is this thing on?” she asks, peering out of the screen.  “Hullo?  Mr. Crowley, are you there?”

“Who…”  Crowley’s voice is reedy, ragged, and he clears his throat.  He drags the duvet up and over his lap and prays to _Someone, anyone_ that Aziraphale has the good sense to stay on the floor and out of sight.  “Who—who is this?  Who’m I speaking to?”

“Oh!  It’s Eric!” Betty White waves, beaming, at the screen.  “Duke Hastur finally gave me dispensation to possess human technology!”

“O-oh.”  Crowley wracks his brain, trying to recall who Eric is.  “That’s, ah, great.  Well done.”

Betty White preens.  “Thank you, Mr. Crowley.  Now.” She assumes a stern expression. “Duke Hastur wants a status report.”

“What, on tempting a bunch of tourists to eat shrooms in the woods?”

“Indeed.”  Betty White nods.  “He wants an update every day.  Says it’s crucial.”

Crowley grits his teeth against a groan.  So this is Hastur’s insidious plot:  to micro-manage Crowley for the rest of eternity.  Figures, since, according to Aziraphale, Beelzebub refused to let Hastur exact a more violent vengeance.  The Duke probably has a legion of condemned former HR workers dedicated to dreaming up pointless busywork for Crowley to do. 

“Did he, now,” Crowley mutters.

“Yes,” Betty White says.  “He said your anguish would never slake his need for retribution like your brutal evisceration would, but it was as good a start as any.”

“Right.”  Crowley can feel a migraine coming on.  “Tell him, uh, I’ve got big plans.  Big plans for tomorrow.”

A pucker forms on Betty White’s brow.  “Mr. Crowley, if you could get to it a little more quickly, I really think…”

“Nah,” Crowley says.  “I do my best work on my own time.  Don’t you worry, those kids will get good and high.  I swear.”  He forces a toothy smile.

“Duke Hastur is in a rotten mood!” Betty White whines.  “He said he’d send me down to the seventh circle of Hell if I don’t bring back a good report.  The harpies are down there!”

“I’m sure they’re not all bad,” Crowley soothes.  “Just don’t look at their breasts.  Terribly self-conscious, those harpies are.”

“But, Mr. Crowley—”

“Eric,” Crowley intones, “part of being a proper demon is thinking on your feet. So, tell Hastur whatever you like. Just leave me be.”

He snaps his fingers at the television screen, summoning the infernal equivalent of a boot to Eric’s arse to send him back Downstairs.  Static ruptures across the screen, obscuring Betty White’s dismayed expression the instant before it goes dark.  Silence creeps into the room.

Aziraphale rises from the floor.  “That,” he says, “was too close for comfort.”

Crowley looks down at him.  An arctic trickle of anxiety worms its way into his heart, banishing the warmth. This is it, then.  Aziraphale – so comfortable, so set in his ways – will have risked giving in to temptation in a moment of madness, but now that they’ve had a literal wake-up call from Hell, he will shy away.  He will put distance between them, afraid for Crowley’s safety, afraid he might Fall.  Crowley’s had the first bite of that apple and he wants more, he’s insatiable, he will forever starve—and he will do it gladly, if only it means Aziraphale will still be there.  That he will still welcome Crowley’s friendship. 

His thoughts must show on his face, for Aziraphale’s eyes widen and he pulls himself to his feet.  “No,” he says, firmly, climbing back on the bed.  “No, whatever it is you’re thinking, Crowley, you must stop.”  His hands are soft on Crowley’s face, one thumb brushing the mark of the serpent, and Crowley shivers with a terrible combination of yearning and fear.  Aziraphale leans close, so close their noses brush.  “Stop.”

“Nothing’s—nothing’s wrong,” Crowley says, but it’s a feeble protest and they both know it. 

Aziraphale indulges him.  “Good.” He brushes a kiss to the corner of Crowley’s mouth, there and gone before he can chase it.  “I haven’t a doubt in the world, my dear.  Not at all.  Only…”  He trails off, bites his lip.

“Only what?”

“Only, I… I may be somewhat out of practice,” Aziraphale admits, flushed. “Rather, er, egregiously so.”

“Out of practice?” Crowley parrots, eyes narrowed.  “So there have been _others?”_

“What I mean,” Aziraphale says, side-stepping the accusation, “is that I… I would…”  He trails off, takes a breath, and utters the rest in a rush.  “I would like to go slowly if that is agreeable to you. Please.”  He bites his lip again, a habit Crowley is beginning to find very agreeable indeed.  Nodding, pretending his heart isn’t knocking a frantic drumbeat in his chest, he tugs Aziraphale forward to start a habit for himself.  The kiss is slow, exploring, with just the barest rasp of teeth to make the angel gasp as they part.  With cheeks pink, lips kiss-swollen, and eyes storm-dark, he is lovelier than Crowley might have thought possible. 

“Anything is agreeable to me,” he says.  “Anything you like.”

Aziraphale averts his eyes to the bedclothes as a smile curls his lips.  “Thank you.  For… understanding.  It’s very good of you.”

 _I’m not that good,_ Crowley thinks, because every moment not touching Aziraphale feels like a moment wasted, and he knows if he begins touching the angel now, it will take a monumental effort of will to stop.  He’ll manage it, of course.  But it’ll be Hell.

“We can watch telly,” he says, gesturing helplessly toward the blank screen. “No Golden Girls, though.  I think I’m done with that.  For a while, at least.  We can…”  He wracks his brain for Victorian-era courting rituals and decides, _Well, fuck it._ “We can… hold hands.  If you like.”

Aziraphale’s eyes glint with mischief.  “Oh, Crowley.  I said I wanted to go slowly, but that’s positively _glacial.”_

Crowley blinks once, slowly, the way a surprised reptile does.  And then, in the moment before Aziraphale pounces on him, he says, “Oh.”

-

Hours later, snogged senseless, Crowley lies tucked into Aziraphale’s side, too dazed to protest when the angel lifts the remote.  After minutes of channel surfing, Aziraphale stops.  “Oh, this looks good.”

And as Antiques Roadshow drones into white noise, Crowley buries his face under Aziraphale’s arm and laughs. 


	17. Beloved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before the Fall, Beelzebub was an angel. After the Fall, they were the Lord of the Flies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based off a Tumblr prompt from psychic-nura: Ineffable Bureaucracy, a sad kiss.
> 
> TW for hints at an abusive relationship. Sorry, maybe I'll write happy Ineffable Bureaucracy one day!

For some, the Fall was a plummet, abrupt and gut-gripping, the only certainty being the sick knowledge that they would break when the rocks rose up to meet them.  For others, like the demon Crawley, it was a gradual thing: a platter laden with questions, each a gleaming fruit, and the realization that you had been poisoned only after you’d gorged yourself to bursting. 

For Beelzebub, the Fall was the flame to their moth – they fluttered, hopeless but entranced, perfectly aware of their fate when they strayed too close.  A burning ember, charred to ash before they landed. 

After, they would remember nothing of this.  No demon would be allowed memories of Heaven – of the joy, the contentment of complacency, the unending sensation of being glutted on God’s love.  They would only remember the agony of Falling and the loneliness that came after.  The hollow ache of being severed away. 

Beelzebub had a different name before they Fell (they  _must have,_ and millennia later, it will still infuriate them that they cannot recall it, a soul-deep bruise of loss).  They had a name, and they had God’s love, and they had the love of one other.

And they had the niggling sensation that something was about to happen.  The first waft of fiery breath on their wings. 

“Gabriel,” they said, alighting beside him.  They stood on the edge of a universe, watching some minor angel weave starlight together out of void.  Without looking away from the cosmic threadwork, Gabriel extended a wing to wrap around Beelzebub, pulling them in close.  They went, not eagerly but with a sense of relief, arms outstretched.  Glad to have the choice firmly taken. 

“Look,” Gabriel said, his voice rumbling through his body into Beelzebub’s.  “The Almighty has assigned that angel to hang the very stars.”

“It is an honor,” Beelzebub murmured, more preoccupied with Gabriel’s warmth, his solidity, than any workings of an inconsequential angel.  “He has been shown favor.”

Beelzebub felt Gabriel tense, minutely, and looked up.  His granite jaw was set in a frown.  “Why does he deserve it?  He is…”

Beelzebub knew this dance well; they had led Gabriel through it many times before.  Always the perfect partner, always letting their beloved believe he was in control.  A well-placed pivot was all they needed to turn him away from his brooding.  “He is nobody.”

“No,” Gabriel said, surprising them.  “Worse.  He is one of Lucifer’s lackeys.”

Dread crept up Beelzebub’s throat, a sour tang.  Lucifer.  Most beautiful among angels, most beloved by the Almighty.  Lucifer, whose every step was shadowed by admirers, all straining to reflect the light shining off him.  Lucifer, whose eyes followed Beelzebub with calculating consideration.  Lucifer, who filled Beelzebub’s mind with questions and possibilities, each more tantalizing than the last. 

Worst of all was that Beelzebub could not find it in their heart to hate those looks, those questions.  In fact, they could not even muster apathy.  They wanted Lucifer’s attentions, his regard.  They basked in his light as a serpent sunning itself on sun-warmed stone. 

 _“You are Beelzebub,”_ the Morningstar had said, having crept up on them on silent feet.  Beelzebub had turned, tense, and mustered a mute nod. Lucifer had cocked his head, arching a golden eyebrow.  _“Why do you cling and grovel behind that fool, Gabriel, so loyally?”_

Beelzebub had bristled, stung out of their stupor.  _“Because I love him.”_

The Morningstar had smiled in a knifing flash of teeth.  _“I can see that.  You are utterly devoted to him, aren’t you?”_

 _“If you knew, why bother asking?”_ Beelzebub had snapped.  They froze, startled by their own vehemence.  _“I—I apologize, Morningstar.  I misspoke.”_

 _“Do not apologize,”_ Lucifer had said, still smiling, as though all of Heaven was but a mild amusement for him. A dollhouse for him to play with as he pleased.  _“I want to see your fire.”_ A meaningful pause, eloquent beyond words.  Then, _“Do you think Gabriel would feel the same?”_

Those words had wriggled their way into Beelzebub’s mind, worms burrowing into the flesh of an apple.  Beelzebub loved Gabriel – had loved him since they first glimpsed him, shining and sharp, a leader among angels.  Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel – Beelzebub was not made to match their greatness, but it was enough to touch Gabriel’s light, to let him enfold them in his wing and draw them close.  It was enough.

It _had been_ enough.

“He shouldn’t have the honor of the stars,” Gabriel muttered, drawing Beelzebub out of their reverie.  Still tucked against his side, they drifted a hand across his chest, to the place where a mortal might have a heart.  Gabriel caught their hand, gripped it to the edge of pain.  “It should be mine.  I should be the one to please the Almighty.”

Oh, but he was such a child, always petulant, always expecting his mediocrity to be praised above a lesser being’s excellence.  Beelzebub loved him in spite of it, but it rankled them. In the distance, the nameless angel scattered stardust across the darkness.  Brilliance winked into being.

“He isn’t doing it properly,” Gabriel muttered, expression dark. “There is no order to it.”

 _No,_ Beelzebub thought, _but it is beautiful because of that.  How do you not see?_

“You will have your chance,” they said, “just as this one has his.”

Abruptly, Gabriel’s wing loosened and he pushed them away. Beelzebub stumbled, caught off-guard, and stood shivering before him, cut off from his warmth.  His face was a thunder of bruised pride, eyes twin bolts of blue-violet lightning. 

“Don’t try to placate me,” Gabriel snarled.  “I am ready for glory _now.”_

“Gabriel,” Beelzebub began, taking a cautious step forward, “beloved, I only meant—”

“Leave me.”  Gabriel turned to glare at the nameless, insignificant angel, still stringing stars without a care in Heaven.  “I would be alone, now.”

 _“I want to see your fire.”_   The Morningstar’s voice echoed in Beelzebub’s head.  _“Do you think Gabriel would feel the same?”_

“I will go.”  Beelzebub heard themself utter each word as if from a vast distance.  “But may I have a parting kiss, beloved?”

The hard line of Gabriel’s mouth softened.  He could not fathom it – could not imagine that Beelzebub would never grovel and beg for his affection.  A spike of rage rose in their chest, startlingly fierce and white-hot.

“You may,” Gabriel said.  So graciously.  It sickened them.  

Beelzebub drew close, playacting wariness, as if every moment they expected him to lash out.  Their hands were soft on his face as they rose on tiptoe, and he did not lean. Always he expected them to scrabble and scrape, to bloody themself on the crags of his pride.  They kissed the firm, unyielding lips and thought, _I will show you my fire, beloved._

There was only rage, they told themself.  Later. Only the rage of being brushed aside, treated as inconsequential. 

But later – thousands of years later, standing on the tarmac of Tadfield Air Base, exchanging a glance with the Archangel Gabriel and remembering nothing of their time in Heaven – Beelzebub feels their throat tighten for the briefest moment.  As if they are choked by tears. 

Beelzebub shakes off the sensation and turns to face an angel, a demon, and the Antichrist.  They are the Lord of the Flies.  They are the right hand of the Devil, and they are going to lead Hell into war. 


	18. Taste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley develops a craving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gets a little raunchy.
> 
> Tumblr prompt from fuckthelanguagebarrier: I imagine you'll get a few of these, but may I request Ineffable Husbands for either 1. a sweet kiss or 17. a love bite? Thank you!
> 
> It's mostly sweet, but I got a little bit of both in there!

Crowley has never been one for eating.

Oh, he’s tried a number of times over the millennia, but no amount of effort can make him derive joy from the act.  He can’t quite tap into the endorphin rush Aziraphale so relishes, and the thought of a lump of mashed-up organic matter sitting in his belly, slowly chewed into pulp by acidic juices before moving down to the plumbing, as it were… well, it all makes him get a bit queasy.  Drinking is one thing, mostly made tolerable by alcohol, but eating is quite another. 

No, Crowley is not a one for eating.  But he does love _tasting._

“This is absolutely delectable,” Aziraphale murmurs, licking a dollop of tiramisu off his fork. Sitting on the other side of the table, chin propped on the heel of his hand, Crowley watches intently.  The angel cuts off another piece of the dessert and pops it into his mouth with an appreciative hum.  “Utterly divine.”

It’s obscene, really, the way Aziraphale eats.  The little sighs and moans, the pink flicker of his tongue, the rapture that toes sacrilegiously close to _religious ecstasy._   It should be classified as public indecency.  The angel should be locked up.

Crowley can’t stop staring.

“Give it here, then,” he says, pleased when his voice emerges in a convincing charade of insouciance. 

Aziraphale sets down his fork, eyebrows arched.  “Really?  I thought you didn’t care for… well, this sort of thing.”

“I don’t,” Crowley says. “But you seem to be having a grand old time with that tiramisu, so…”  He trails off, hand outstretched.  Aziraphale hesitates and he smirks.  “What? Scared about swapping a little saliva, angel?”

Aziraphale hands over the fork and nudges the plate across the table.  The tips of his ears have gone strawberry shortbread-pink.  “Of course not.”

Crowley laves his tongue over the tines.  He is glad for the concealment of his sunglasses, for as he licks up traces of dusky coffee and feather-froth mascarpone, he keeps his gaze fixed on Aziraphale. And when he tastes it at last – a trace of fresh apple and unsullied desert air, the angel’s taste, a six-thousand-year-old savor of Eden – his eyes slip shut. 

-

It becomes something of a game, chasing Aziraphale’s taste.  Crowley tells himself it’s because he’s got nothing better to do, now that Armageddon has been cancelled and Adam Young has decreed that Messing People About should be kept to a minimum.  It’s boredom, it’s Hellish mischief, it’s the latest sally in Crowley’s eternal battle against his Adversary. 

Most of all, it’s a pity, because Crowley has learned enough self-awareness to see a list of denials when he’s the one writing it.  Fortunately, he also has just enough of a sense of self-preservation left to keep on denying.  Peter the Apostle could have learned a thing or two from Crowley. 

He starts small. Crowley might prefer to terrify his houseplants into verdant beauty, but he does know gardening.  For a temptation to truly work, you must plant the seed, tend the soil.  With patience, care, and just the tiniest infernal nudge, you can reap a bountiful harvest. 

“Funny, how humans worked that out,” Crowley remarks one day, as they sit in a posh little café in Mayfair. 

Aziraphale licks a smudge of crème brûlée off his spoon and sets it down, cocking his head.  “What do you mean?”

Crowley waves a hand at the dish.  “Well, how, way back when, some brilliant bugger thought, ‘huh, what happens when I add heavy cream and sugar and egg yolks together and torch the top?’  It’s clever, that’s all.”

Aziraphale considers the cracked crust of his dessert.  “Well. I suppose I never considered it.”

Crowley says nothing more on the subject, but he doesn’t need to.  He can see the light of curiosity burning in the angel’s gaze long after they leave the café.  _Seed planted._

Later, giddy with his own sense of spontaneity, Aziraphale invites Crowley to the little flat above the bookshop.  They walk into the kitchenette, Aziraphale bubbling with excitement, Crowley feigning confusion.  The angel gestures to the ingredient-laden table with a flourish. 

“What’s all this?” Crowley asks, perfectly aware of what it is.

“Ingredients!” Aziraphale exclaims.  “We’re going to try baking!”

Crowley affects a long-suffering groan.  “This is pointless.  We can just miracle biscuits onto your plate, and besides, I don’t even like—”

“I know, I know,” Aziraphale says, “but this is more fun!”

It’s a simple recipe for chocolate biscuits.  Well, it’s simple in theory, at least.  Aziraphale and Crowley have never bothered to learn how to bake, not with the power of Heaven and Hell at their fingertips.  They soon discover the trials of eggshell in the batter, whisking too quickly, and _goodness, Crowley, are you certain you greased the pan?_ The first batch looks more like charred lumps than biscuits, exiting the oven in a putrid cloud of smoke, but Aziraphale will not be deterred. They start a second batch with infinite care.  Crowley is so preoccupied learning how to break an egg without getting shell shards in the bowl that he almost misses Aziraphale raising the spatula to his lips for a languorous lick. 

Almost.  But not quite.

“These will be better,” Aziraphale says, certain in a way that means the biscuits will be delicious even if they mucked up every direction in the cookbook.  As he turns to put the pan in the oven, Crowley snatches up the spatula, still smeared with chocolate batter, and steals a taste. 

And there it is again – hidden beneath sugar, butter, flour, chocolate – the faintest trace of apple and garden air.  His eyes close and a sigh gusts out of his chest.

“Crowley?  What on Earth are you doing?”

Crowley startles, the spatula slipping from his fingers.  The utensil tumbles to the floor in a spatter of chocolate.  “Ngk—nothing.”

Aziraphale slants him a dubious look.  “Were you tasting the batter?”

“Maybe,” Crowley mumbles.

The angel’s lips stretch in a grin.  “You’re becoming fonder of food than you let on, dear boy.  Don’t worry, I shan’t tell a soul.”

“Shut it,” Crowley grumbles, stooping to pick up the spatula.

When the biscuits are done, Aziraphale takes a bite and declares them to be scrumptious.  Crowley wouldn’t know.  Compared to the taste of angel, they are dirt in his mouth.

-

It becomes a ritual for them, the baking.  Aziraphale claims it calms him after a long day at the shop, that he likes making things with his hands _._ They actually become not-rubbish at it, churning out batch after batch of increasingly complex biscuits before graduating to other sweets. Bars follow the biscuits, and are in turn trailed by tarts and pies and cakes.  Despite Aziraphale’s insistence on doing things _the proper way,_ miracles join the mix as often as not, a spice no kitchen in the world could replicate. 

Crowley becomes adept at stealing tastes of Aziraphale.  He hoards them, pilfering used spatulas, bowls, and stray spoons.

Time passes.  When you are immortal, time does that – slips through your fingers like flour through a sifter, each dust-fine speck a day, a week, a month.  And then, years later, Aziraphale invites Crowley over to work on a lemon curd cake. 

“Curd’s almost done chilling,” Aziraphale says.  “How’s the batter coming along, my dear?”

“Nearly there,” Crowley says, preoccupied with folding in the whites.  “Oven up to temperature?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says. He snaps his fingers and the oven chimes in agreement, a _whoosh_ of hot air filling its belly. 

Crowley lifts a skeptical eyebrow.  “That’s cheating, angel.”

“Oh, hush.  I’m only speeding the process along.”  As Crowley slides the pans into the oven, Aziraphale opens the refrigerator and lifts out the dish of chilled curd.  Crowley turns to watch, frozen, as the angel dips a finger in and lifts a yellow dollop to his lips.  Pink lips, pink tongue.  A divine sigh.  “Perfect.”

“Stop that,” Crowley says, voice thin in his ears.  “You’ll eat it all and we won’t have any for the cake.”

“Oh, tosh,” Aziraphale says. He dips his spit-slick finger into the curd, and Crowley should be mortified, he should be disgusted – but instead he’s striding forward, body leagues ahead of his mind.  His hand shoots out to close around the angel’s wrist.  Aziraphale makes a noise of protest.  And falls silent.

Crowley lurches back, the tang of lemon curd and angel skin leaping on his tongue.  Aziraphale is staring at him with wide eyes.  “Angel, I’m, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I was…”

“Oh,” Aziraphale breathes, already reaching for him.  “Oh, _Crowley.”_

-

Aziraphale is still trembling, still panting like he truly needs his lungs when Crowley lifts his head. He crawls across the angel’s naked body, smearing wet, open-mouthed kisses along the way – the crease of his thigh, the mound of his belly, the center of his chest, the column of his neck.  Aziraphale shivers out a laugh at the brush of Crowley’s tongue on his skin.  “Stop—stop that, you rogue.”

“Nah,” Crowley murmurs, rasping his teeth to redden the skin, memorizing the savor of his sweat. “Never.  Love how you taste.”

Aziraphale’s fingers thread through his hair, soothing and inciting at once.  “Come here, then.  Let me taste myself on you.”

Crowley shudders and tilts his head up for a kiss.  He has never been one for eating, but this is a hunger he will never sate. 


	19. Still

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley has kept Aziraphale from being discorporated a handful of times over the millennia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on a Tumblr prompt by axton-blogs: Ineffable Husbands, tending an injury.

Aziraphale has had the same body for six-thousand years, and that is due in no small part to Crowley. Aziraphale’s survived plenty of scrapes over the millennia, but each time one grew truly dire, Crowley would ferret him out in the nick of time.  

The first time it happens, Aziraphale has wandered out of the Garden.  Squinting in the sunlight, startled by how very _harsh_  everything is - the sun lancing his fair skin, the sand baking his bare feet, the arid wind blasting grit - Aziraphale does not think to watch his flank, and that is when Crowley strikes.  They may have commiserated up on the gate, but things are different outside Eden.  Aziraphale is an angel and Crowley is a demon, and it is knitted into their incorporeal DNA to do battle.  So, when Crowley charges him with a feral shriek, Aziraphale is wholly unprepared.  The angel whirls around, catches his heel on a jutting rock, and tumbles backwards down a sand dune.

And strikes his skull on a sharp stone.

Aziraphale comes to, dazed, to find Crowley grumbling at his side.  He tries to swat the demon away, but Crowley only snarls at him, _hold still, you idiot, I’ve nearly finished mending your head.  I don’t think letting your brains dribble out would make you any more witless, but let’s not take any chances._

Crowley is gone moments later, gone before Aziraphale can fathom how to react.  He touches the back of his head.  His hair is stiff with dried blood, but the skin is unbroken.

The next time it happens is centuries later, when Aziraphale has run afoul of a demon.  Not Crowley - he hasn’t the foggiest what this fellow’s name is, only that he was lurking among a group of highwaymen, tempting them to rob passers-by traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho.  Aziraphale, believing his enemies all human, sends them into a stupor with a few well-spoken Words.  He only realizes one of them is a demon when he feels the bloom of pain in his back, the warm rush of blood.  He manages to discorporate the demon before staggering off the road, mindless from pain to all but the need for _shelter, safety._ He takes refuge in a cave, but try as he might, he cannot heal the infernal wound.  As the sun sets and the moon rises, Aziraphale begins to shiver from more than mere cold.

 _Aziraphale!_   He thinks someone is calling his name, but no, it must just be the scream of the wind outside.  Aziraphale sits back against cold stone, trembling violently, darkness creeping across the edges of his vision.

And then: hands on his shoulders.  He cannot tell if they are shaking him or trying to hold him still, he is shivering so hard. _Aziraphale!  Wake up, you idiot!_

He opens his eyes with a weak attempt at a smile.   _Ah, dear… dear boy.  S-so sorry, but I-I’m rather indisp– indisposed._

 _Shove yourself,_  Crowley barks, his voice echoing shrilly in the cave, and he tips Aziraphale onto his front.  His hands graze the wound in his back and shrink back as if burned.  Then, _Hold still._  Aziraphale hasn’t a moment to protest before his tunic is torn away in a flash of pain.  He keens, curling into himself, as fresh blood oozes from the wound.   _Hold still.  I can.  I can fix this._

Aziraphale may be delirious, but he thinks he glimpses Crowley’s hand shaking the moment before he snaps his fingers.

It happens a handful of times over the millennia.  When Aziraphale wanders, bone-weary and bedraggled from a seedy alleyway in Jerusalem, Crowley just happens upon him.   _Hold still,_  he says, brooking no argument as he grips the angel’s wrist, turns it to expose the pale forearm, the lily-white patch of skin that hasn’t gone away in weeks.  Crowley prods it with a sharp nail, and Aziraphale watches with detached alarm as blood pearls painlessly.   _Been miracling lepers well, have you?  Let’s sort that before pieces of you start falling off._

Thousands of years later, as they stroll out of the Bastille, Crowley remarks, _good thing I happened upon you when I did.  I dunno if I could heal a decapitated body._

Aziraphale harrumphs.   _Oh, really.  You needn’t be so dramatic._

Nearly one-hundred and fifty years later, after Crowley drops a church on a gang of Nazis as effortlessly as Dorothy dropping a house on the Wicked Witch, after he saves Aziraphale’s books and steals Aziraphale’s _heart -_ after all that, Aziraphale is running through the chaos of London, alarms screaming overhead, people clotting the pavement as they try to get underground.  There is the piercing whistle, the doom drop, and Aziraphale is about to snap his fingers and deflect the bomb when a mammoth of a man knocks into him and he falls to his hands and knees.  He is too busy trying to find his feet, trying not to be crushed by the tide of humanity, when the bomb hits and the world is obliterated in a cacophony of screams.  

He comes to he doesn’t _know_ when, groaning past what feels like an elephant on his back.  Only it isn’t an elephant, it’s part of a fallen wall, and his legs are crushed and his spine is crushed and _oh, goodness, is that– yes, that is a metal rod sticking out of my side_  and this is going to be such a nightmare to explain to Gabriel.  

Aziraphale is just about to get around to the business of dying when the rubble around him shifts and groans.  And then the weight on his back is gone and Crowley is kneeling beside him, spitting curses, hands scrabbling over his shoulders and down to his crushed legs.   _You idiot!  You blasted, bloody fool!  Why couldn’t you leave London when you had the chance!_

 _Couldn’t leave my bookshop,_  Aziraphale says.  He shivers as sensation returns to his legs in a trickle like sun-warmed honey.  And Crowley curses him and curses him and curses him for a fool.

Later, deep in their cups, Aziraphale plucks up the courage to ask, _How do you always find me?_

Crowley gives him a blank look.  (At least Aziraphale _thinks_  it’s a blank look.  Drat it, but he sometimes resents those glasses.)   _I can sense pain.  M’a demon, after all._

Aziraphale lifts the cup to hide his frown.  Ridiculous of him, really.  What did he think, that Crowley was looking out for him?  That he was especially attuned to him?  Love makes fools of us all, he thinks.   _I see._

After - after _you go too fast for me, Crowley,_ after Armageddon - Aziraphale is in his bookshop, leafing through a heavy tome as Crowley slinks aimlessly around the stacks.  Aziraphale’s attention slips and his finger brushes the edge of a crisp-new page, opening the skin with a bright sting of pain.  He winces and closes the book.

 _Angel?_ Crowley asks.   _You all right?_

 _Yes, fine– I’m fine,_  Aziraphale says, but Crowley is already crossing the shop, hand outstretched.  He catches Aziraphale’s hand and brings it up to his scrutiny.  Aziraphale feels his chest tighten.   _I’m fine, really…_

 _Hold still._   Crowley rubs the pad of his thumb over the cut, so gently, a line of warmth knitting the skin together.  Aziraphale, flustered, tears his hand away.  His voice is sharp in his own ears.   _Really, Crowley, I said I’m fine!_

Crowley’s expression goes blank.  He takes a step back, hands buried in his pockets.   _Sorry._

And later, sitting in the armchair in the backroom of the bookshop, hating himself, heartsick for what he lost over a stupid, knee-jerk impulse leftover from Heaven - from a family that is no longer his - Aziraphale drops his face into his hands and wills himself to breathe.  And startles when the door creaks open.

Crowley, standing in the doorway.   _I thought I felt– felt you were hurt.  But you’re…_ He trails off, and something in Aziraphale’s face must resemble great pain, because he takes another step inside.   _Angel, are you all right?_

 _No,_  Aziraphale says, _I– I do believe my heart is wounded._

Crowley draws closer, intent on him.   _You don’t look wounded._

_But it hurts._

_Let me see._ Crowley stoops before him, hands gentle on his wrists.  And Aziraphale thinks of thousands of years of this, of shattered bones and bloody wounds and horrible ailments, and of Crowley healing each one in turn.  Protecting him.

 _I’m sorry I snapped at you,_  Aziraphale says.

_S’fine.  Are you certain you’re hurt?_

Aziraphale, heart hammering, turns his wrist to grasp Crowley’s hand.  He lifts it to his lips, holding lightly, giving Crowley plenty of freedom to pull away.  When the demon makes no move to do so, he brushes his lips to his palm.  Healing the little hurt.  Crowley shivers in his grasp.  

 _Yes?_ Aziraphale asks.

Crowley swallows, nods.   _Yeah– yes.  Yes._

Aziraphale draws him closer.   _I think I am going to be quite all right._


	20. Catch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the humans make war with Heaven and Hell, Aziraphale is wholly unprepared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on Tumblr prompts from tooticking and woatherose: Catching the other before they fall + a sorry kiss.
> 
> TW for violence, gore, and mention of minor character death.

When the humans make war with Heaven and Hell, Aziraphale is wholly unprepared.

Oh, he knew it would happen. Knew it would happen the way he and Crowley and all the denizens of Heaven and Hell had known Armageddon would happen.  He knew it the way the humans knew their planet would one day turn on them, battered and mangled so far past recognition it no longer bore the faintest resemblance to that which God had looked upon, six-thousand years ago, and deemed _Good._  

Aziraphale knew it would happen, but he buried his head in the sand.  With his fears gone quiescent beneath a cozy topsoil of contentment, he had basked in the next few decades with Crowley, blind to the looming threat. He might have gone on that way, burying himself deeper and deeper, each grain of sand a day, a month, a year, until the world became inhospitable to life.  And then he and Crowley would have gone on living in it, eternal and unshakable, spitting defiance in the face of all who presumed to uproot them. 

It was, Aziraphale will muse later, a lovely dream.  A fantasy, swift to steal away upon waking.

When the humans come to make war, Aziraphale is wholly unprepared.  Not because he didn’t think it possible – even his denial did not plumb so deeply, not after word came of the humans’ new inventions, weapons that could destroy angels and demons at a single stroke.  Not discorporate, not invoke a stack of paperwork and a strongly-worded note from Someone.  Nothing so kind.  The humans had fashioned blades capable of carving immortal flesh, severing the links to Above and Below irreparably.  They invented traps to hold demons fast, nets to pluck angels from the sky.  Cages to stifle their powers, make them incapable of miracles.

 _You’ve got to give it to them,_ Crowley had said, hands on Aziraphale’s waist as he craned over his shoulder to read the latest report from Gabriel, _the humans’ve always been the most creative of us._

Aziraphale had rolled up the Heaven-tinged scroll, set it aside, and turned in Crowley’s arms to kiss him.  His hands cradled the demon’s face, fingers threading through close-cropped hair as he exulted in the familiar, milky-tea warmth of his mouth.  _Let’s go back to bed, dearest._

It was so easy, this: forgetting the rest of the world as it crumbled into ruin outside their window, because Aziraphale’s world entire was in his arms, in his bed.  Here, Aziraphale could simply _be_ with Crowley, uncaring of Heaven’s eye.  Here, Aziraphale could drape their bed in eggshell blue sheets and admire the contrast as he tumbled Crowley onto them, slate dark against a morning sky.  Here, Crowley could experiment with his garden, terrifying and tending the plants by turns.  (Carrots, they’d found, thrived on fear.  Tomatoes had to be coddled, lest they wither on the vine.)  Here, Aziraphale could set up bee hives and cajole their inhabitants to make the sweetest, richest honey to drizzle on their scones and croissants. Here, in their little cottage in the South Downs, Aziraphale could convince himself the war would pay them no mind.  They were on their own side.  An outpost of neutrality on the edge of the world. 

When word came of Uriel and Sandalphon’s deaths, Aziraphale drew wards around the cottage.  When, months later, news of Dagon’s gruesome demise followed, he reinforced the wards.  Crowley planted a grove of oak trees to form a perimeter around the cottage, coaxing them from seeds to saplings to sentinels fully-grown.  He was unusually kind to them, all honeyed words and sweet promises, and they grew stout and proud on his love.  Now, their leaves dapple shadows on the paving stones leading to Crowley’s garden, carpet the dying grass in carmine and flame when autumn comes. 

When Gabriel sent the sword with a simple missive – _Join us, Aziraphale –_ Aziraphale’s rage wicked along the metal, a tongue of flame so hungry it threatened to burn down the cottage.  After his ire cooled, he opened a pocket in the ether and dropped the sword inside, intent on leaving it there for eternity.  _It’s alright, Crowley,_ he said to the still air.  _It’s gone now._   As if the blade had been the thing to fear.

Crowley emerged from the kitchen, his indifferent expression betrayed by the tense set of his shoulders. Just then, Aziraphale must have looked as ancient and weary as he felt, for the demon’s faltering steps grew sure as he crossed the distance to pull him into an embrace.  Aziraphale clutched Crowley close, molding the demon’s sharp angles to him, memorizing them as if he hadn’t seen, touched, tasted, explored them for the past three decades. 

Perhaps he had known, even then, deep down – known how very fragile the life they’d built had grown. Perhaps a wise, unheeded part of himself was already counting the cracks, watching them web across the sugar-spun glass of their haven. 

No, Aziraphale knew the humans would come for them.  He knew what they could do.  And yet, when the humans bring war to his doorstep, he is wholly unprepared for his own reaction. 

“Ah, that must be little Elena,” he says, hearing the knock at the door.  Anathema and Newt’s eldest is their closest neighbor, her cottage a mere handful of miles up the road.  He wipes his flour-dusted hands on the front of his apron and reaches for a dishtowel to cover the dough.  “Crowley, dearest, if you would be so kind…”

Crowley is already slithering toward the door.  “You know, angel, Elena’s nearly thirty.  Not a little girl hiding behind her mum’s—”

Crowley trails off as he swings open the door.  There is a horrible moment of silence.  Then Crowley sucks in a startled breath, a cry cut short.  Aziraphale looks up.

A massive man stands in the doorway, his frame eclipsing Crowley’s.  For a heartbeat, the world slows.  It is the languid drip of honey on Aziraphale’s fingers, the first tentative shoots breaking free from the seeds in Crowley’s garden.  In a single, stretched heartbeat, Aziraphale sees all that he cherishes and all he is about to lose.

The man rams an arm forward and Crowley stumbles, gasping, his hand flying up to his chest.  When the man jerks back his arm, Aziraphale sees it: a dagger, cruelly sharp, a ravening evil emanating from the steel. The blade is wet with blood, and before Aziraphale can think, he is unfurling his wings and hurtling towards them. The flaming sword leaps into his hand in a microsecond of thought, and an animal scream is roaring in his ears, scraping out of his throat.  He raises the blade to strike, to cleave the human in half.  He is a mortal, a man, a mayfly being destined to return to the dirt, _how dare such an insignificant_ nothing  _take Crowley from me—_

“Aziraphale!”  The voice is a tattered scrap amid the hurricane of Aziraphale’s mind.  “Aziraphale, _stop!”_

There is a hand on his wrist, a body clinging whipcord-tight against him, holding him fast. Aziraphale strains to bring down his blade, to slice the man apart, but the hand is shockingly strong.  A voice bellows in his ear.  “Angel, stop!  _Stop!”_

The hand on his wrist moves to cup Aziraphale’s as they grip the hilt of the sword.  There is an agonized cry as infernal flesh brushes holy steel and Aziraphale jumps, startled by the sound.  The stink of burnt meat floods his senses and his gorge rises.  He drops the blade with a clatter, bending double as his stomach threatens to empty its contents on the floor. 

There is a _snap_ and the man in the doorway shrieks. Aziraphale looks up, dazed, to see that the man’s dagger has transformed into a serpent.  Long and immense, scales acid yellow, the snake thrashes in the man’s grip, jaws parting to bare a black tongue and curved fangs.  The snake lunges once, twice, thrice, sinking its fangs into its captor’s face each time, rending the flesh to bloody tatters.  The man falls screaming to the floor.  With another _snap,_ the serpent dissolves into smoke. 

Crowley slumps at Aziraphale’s side.  Startled out of his reverie, the angel grabs him around the shoulder and drags him away from the screaming, twitching man.  His mind is an echoing litany of _please, please, don’t let him die, I need him, please—_

“Crowley,” he rasps, throat raw, “Crowley, dearest, please tell me you’re—”

“Hang on,” Crowley says between gritted teeth. 

Aziraphale lays him down gently on the tile and quickly locates the source of the blood:  a slick, dark patch on Crowley’s sleeve. His hands are anything but gentle as he makes quick work of the fabric to reveal the wound.  A single stab, laying the flesh of Crowley’s upper forearm open to the bone.  Agonizing, no doubt, but far from fatal.  Crowley must have raised his arm at the last moment to shield himself.  A breath of relief gusts out of Aziraphale.  That ravening blade was meant to kill angels and demons; wounds inflicted by it cannot be miracled away.  If Crowley had reacted a fraction of an instant more slowly, he may very well be dead.

On the other side of the room, the man’s screams fall silent.  His twitching stills.  Aziraphale cannot find it in his heart to care.  He speaks past the lump in his throat.  “Crowley.”

The demon winces.  “I don’t—don’t think it’s too grim.”

“He could have _killed_ you.”

Crowley attempts a wry grin, but it cracks under the pain.  “Could have.”

Aziraphale’s hands shake too hard and he fumbles the first snap, but the second summons a medical kit. He gropes at the clasp, fingers tacky with blood.  His lips form an endless mantra of soothing words,  _don’t worry, dear, we’ll have you right as rain in no time, everything will be perfectly fine, you’ll see_ and he can’t for the life of him guess which of them needs comforting more.  Crowley hisses past the pain as the needle threads itself and goes to work. 

“Oh,” Aziraphale gasps, seeing the demon’s red-raw fingers.  “Crowley, your hand—”

Crowley tries to draw back.  “It’s nothing.”

A cold wave of guilt creeps over Aziraphale’s heart.  He catches Crowley’s hand, careful not to touch the burns.  “When you stopped me from… from attacking that human… Oh, Crowley, darling, I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t be,” Crowley cuts in, his tone fierce.  Aziraphale bites his lip, averting his gaze, and Crowley grips his wrist with his uninjured hand.  His fingers are a vise around Aziraphale’s.  “Angel. Don’t be.  If our positions had been reversed, I would have…”  He trails off, the little color left in his face draining away.  “I would have flayed that human living, and there would be no power in Heaven or Hell that could stop me.”

Aziraphale, eyes stinging, nods. 

Later, after Crowley has disposed of the body and Aziraphale has strengthened the wards, they lock up the cottage and retreat to the bedroom.  Seated on the edge of the mattress, Aziraphale inspects Crowley’s bandaged forearm with an eagle eye.  His miracles have ensured that the wound was sterilized, the sutures placed with surgical perfection, the bandages tied tightly but not too tightly.  Crowley gives a put-upon huff as Aziraphale finishes his inspection, but he makes no protest when the angel lifts his bandaged fingers to his lips.  He kisses each one in turn, and the guilt sinks ten levels deep.

“I am sorry for this,” Aziraphale murmurs.

“I told you,” Crowley says, not as waspish as he might like, “don’t be.”

“But I am.” Aziraphale brushes his lips over Crowley’s knuckles.  “You can’t stop me.”

Crowley scowls.  “Shut it.”  He rolls over in the bed, dragging the covers over him with a wince.  “Get in, angel.”

Aziraphale obeys. Sliding in behind Crowley, he curls his arm around his waist and noses at his nape.  His mind swirls with terrors.  They aren’t safe here.  Aziraphale can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to the war, not with the flash of that vile blade still keen in his memory.  That human slipped past his wards, which means other humans could do the same.  They will come with their blades and cut Crowley down, cut Crowley away from him forever—

“Angel,” Crowley grouses, “stop.  Thinking. Can’t sleep with you fretting like that.”

“Oh.  Sorry, love.”

They lie in silence for a while, but try as he might, Aziraphale cannot banish the question. It careens around his mind, a kite on a tangled string.  His arms tighten around Crowley. 

“You stopped me,” he says, quietly.  “Why?”

Crowley is silent so long Aziraphale wonders if he’s slipped off to sleep.  Then, his voice the barest hiss, he says, “You could’ve Fallen for that, you know.  Killing a human.  She may be fickle, but She prizes them above any of us.  So.”  He shifts closer, flicking an amber glance over one shoulder.  “Couldn’t risk it.”

“I would have done it,” Aziraphale says.  “For you. I would have done it for you.”

“I know,” Crowley says, “and it would have killed you.  Heaven is full of fools, but you’re good, Aziraphale, you really—you really are. And killing that human would have destroyed you.  In the end.”

Aziraphale can think of nothing to say, so he says nothing at all.  He shifts impossibly closer, kissing the nape of Crowley’s neck, and closes his eyes.  The war will keep until tomorrow.  For now – for now, he will claim this moment, guard it for them.  Until tomorrow.


	21. Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Ancient Sumer, the demon Crawly teaches the angel Aziraphale about stories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The tablet referenced here is based off the poem of Inanna and Ebih by Enheduanna, but don't fact-check me too much because I fudged the dates. 
> 
> Based off a Tumblr prompt from martiansourcream: One teaching the other something new.

Standing outside a mudbrick house in the Sumerian city of Ur, Crawly considers the object in his hands. A large, flat oblong, it might be considered heavy by human standards. It would certainly be a trial for a human to pilfer it still hot from the kiln like a child stealing bread from the oven. But trials for humans are mere parlor tricks for demons. 

Crawly turns the tablet over, brow furrowed as he examines the markings etched into the clay from a new angle. A startled smile breaks across his features.  _Aha._

“Crawly?”

Crawly’s fingers tighten around the tablet, but otherwise, he gives no outward sign of surprise. He raises his head to regard the angel with a cool stare. “Aziraphale. Been a while, hasn’t it?”

Aziraphale cocks his head. “Oh, I suppose it’s been… well, goodness, at least one-hundred years.” Crawly watches the angel closely as he talks. His hands are constantly in motion, fingers knitting and unknitting before him.  _Are all angels so fidgety?_  “The time does pass so quickly among humans.”

“It does at that,” Crawly says, flicking his eyes back to the tablet. “Diverting creatures.”

Aziraphale shifts fractionally closer, instantly putting Crawly on his guard. But the angel stays a safe few paces away, neck craned to better inspect the tablet. “What is that?”

“A story, I think,” says Crawly. He’d seen the head priestess making her etchings the other day, so mired in concentration she had seemed lost to the world. Something about that intense focus had reminded Crawly of the prophets of old, of Moses and Elijah sunk deep in communion with Her. The sight had unsettled Crawly as much as it entranced him, and it was with equal parts reluctance and curiosity that he returned to steal the tablet from the kiln. 

Lost in thought, Crawly is slow to notice the angel’s silence. When he looks up, Aziraphale is regarding him with a puzzled expression. “What is a ‘story?’”

Crawly blinks, momentarily thrown. “A… well, it’s a story. A tale.”

A frown darkens Aziraphale’s face. “That means nothing to me.”

“A _story._ ” Crawly casts about for a simpler explanation, but it is as if he is trying to reduce building blocks to building blocks. Stories are fundamental structures, bases upon which the imagination builds. 

 _That’s why,_ he realizes.  _Heaven has no imagination._

He changes tack. “You know writing, yes?”

“I’m an angel,” Aziraphale says, testily. “Of course I know whatwritingis. The Almighty has given me the knowledge to read every written language the humans invent.”

“Well,” Crawly soldiers on, “this is writing of things that didn’t happen.”

Aziraphale’s frown deepens into suspicion. “Deceit, you mean.”

“No,” Crawly says, aggrieved. “It’s… it’s more like… games. You’ve seen human children playing, yes?” Seeing the gathering thunderclouds of indignation, he hastily adds, “Stories are like writing and play. The humans know they aren’t necessarily true, but they enjoy them anyway.”

“Why would they enjoy reading things have haven’t happened? There’s no point to it.”

Crawly shrugs. He is beginning to feel as if he’s been instructed to fill an endless void with the basest knowledge, to cobble together a universe from spare parts. “They… they justdo _._ They enjoy using their imaginations.”

“Well. That explains it. Angels don’t need imagination.” Aziraphale shrugs, but his offhand tone is belied by the curious gleam in his eyes as they track over the tablet. Crawly waits a beat, suspended by a sensation like weightlessness, and at last the angel says, “What is it about, then? This _story.”_

“A god yelling at a mountain,” Crawly answers. 

Aziraphale scoffs and crosses his arms. “That sounds utterly ridiculous.”

Crawly studies the angel. For all his hauteur, his curiosity is piqued. Crawly has been plying his wiles for a thousand years, now – he knows temptation when he sees it, and if reading stories was a sin, he suspects he would have the makings of a Fallen angel on his hands. A prickle of remorse creeps across his flesh at the thought, as unpleasant as a chill breeze. He shrugs it off.  _More’s the pity. Reading stories isn’t a sin. She probably just prefers Her lackeys dumb and obedient._

Inspiration strikes. “Why are you here, angel? Come to thwart my wicked deeds?”

Aziraphale tears his gaze away from the tablet with a visible struggle. His fingers are moving again, steepling and netting back and forth. “A-ah, yes, in fact, I have. I was just passing through when I noticed a distinct whiff of evil, and indeed, here you are. Stealing and promoting…” His gaze flits to the tablet and away, so swift Crawly might not have noticed. But _oh,_ he notices. Aziraphale coughs delicately. “…Promoting blasphemous deceit, apparently.”

“Oh, no,” says Crawly. “You caught me! Drat, I’ve been thwarted yet again.”

Aziraphale narrows his eyes. “You’re mocking me.”

“I’m not. I’ve been bested by my hated Adversary and I’m absolutely gutted about it.”

“Now I _know_ you’re up to no good,” Aziraphale snaps, waspish, and lays his hands on the tablet. Crawly puts up a token struggle before releasing the stolen treasure. Checking an impulse to shake his fist, he settles for a muttered oath and retreats a few paces. Aziraphale beams, triumphant. “Begone, fiend, and trouble these good people no longer.”

“Curses,” Crawly says dryly. Aziraphale frowns and, realizing his misstep, the demon puts his back into it. “I’ll win over Ssssumer in the end, angel! Jusssst you wait and ssssee! Ssssooner or later, they will all belong to my massster!”

Crawly flees after that, mostly because he fears he’s gone overboard and ruined the ploy. He needn’t worry. If he had stayed a moment longer, stolen a covert look, he would have seen the reverence with which the angel Aziraphale passes his fingers over the etched characters. 

Five-thousand years later, Crowley impulsively seeks out the tablet. He doesn’t expect to find it, doesn’t dare hope it has survived the ravages of history. When he does, it seems both a marvel and a sign. 

“Really, my dear,” Aziraphale says as Crowley leads him through the museum, “this is all very intriguing, but to bring us to America of all places…”

“Don’t pout,” Crowley says, tugging on Aziraphale's arm. After they’ve finally sorted out their feelings for each other, he can’t help but touch the angel at every opportunity. He never wants to stop. “Look, after this, we’ll get you some of that famous Chicago deep-dish pizza. How does that sound?”

Aziraphale _tsks._ “Cheek.” But his mutterings fall silent as they reach the display case. His breath catches. “Oh, Crowley. Is that…?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale murmurs, wonderingly. His gaze is fixed on the clay tablet – battered and worn after thousands of years, many of the characters rubbed away – but his hand is firm as he braids their fingers together. “You old serpent.  I knew you were a romantic at heart.”

 


	22. Suit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley attend an award ceremony in Crowley's honor. Crowley is appreciative. Aziraphale is a bastard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains some fairly explicit sexual stuff, so if that's not your jam, you may want to skip it. 
> 
> Based on a Tumblr prompt from boat-nectar1: Ineffable husbands 1) I hope we don't get caught kiss or 2) getting caught in the act. 
> 
> Also, I feel like the showmanship aspect of this may have accidentally emulated another fic, but I can't find it, so if you know which one it is, let me know and I can update the notes. :)

When Crowley informed Aziraphale he was to be honored for his wicked work by an order of formerly-Satanic nuns and would Aziraphale like to attend the ceremony, _yes, it will be ridiculous and the nuns are all absolutely barking mad, but there will be plenty of alcohol and those little salmon canapes you like so well, and you know what, this is idiotic, never mind—_ Well, the angel was only too happy to attend.  It cheered Aziraphale to see Crowley excited at the prospect of the praise he so rarely received, even if he tried to hide it behind a thin veneer of scorn. 

So, of course, he said yes. 

In hindsight, Aziraphale wishes he had asked a few more questions about the ceremony – in particular, how he would be required to dress and behave and _pretend he wasn’t an angel_ _to a room full of formerly-Satanic nuns who knew full-well Crowley was a demon._  He is just a little put out by the whole thing. 

Also, his feet are beginning to hurt.  The event hall of Tadfield Manor Conference and Management Training Center is by no means an infernal location, but its previous stint as the home of the Chattering Order of St. Beryl still lingers in the floor tiles, seeping up like acid fumes.  Aziraphale shifts subtly from foot-to-foot, jaw locked against the pain.

“You know,” he says in an undertone, punctuating the words with a gulp from his wine glass, “this whole thing rather smacks of subterfuge, my dear.”

“I said I was sorry,” Crowley says.  “What more do you want?”

“To be wearing my own clothes, for a start.”  Aziraphale looks down at his suit-clad form.  The suit is a navy-blue, single-breasted affair that hugs certain areas of his body in a manner Aziraphale can only term _sinful._ Crowley swore with hand on heart that the suit is purely for the ceremony, but judging from the way his eyes clung when Aziraphale tried it on, the way his hands lingered as those sly, wiling lips proclaimed a simple desire to make adjustments… well.  Aziraphale is an angel, but he is certainly no fool.  And after becoming the primary source of temptation for Crowley, he’s getting rather good at knowing when his own wiles are at work.

“I won’t apologize for dragging your wardrobe into the present day,” Crowley says.  “Especially since I know you’ll go back to wearing tartan bowties and sock suspenders the minute I turn my back.”

Aziraphale winces and takes another swig of wine.  Despite all his winging, the drinks are truly excellent.  Satanic nuns must know how to have a good time.  “I’ve never heard you complain about the suspenders before, Crowley. But if you really hate them so much, I can stop—”

“No,” Crowley cuts in, just a hair too quickly.  Aziraphale smirks and Crowley flushes up to the tips of his ears.  “You’re a proper bastard, you are.”

Aziraphale polishes off his wine glass, savoring the taste of victory.  “And you have a crippling weakness for me in my sock suspenders. Don’t worry, dear boy.  I promise to exploit it only at your request.”

“Meaning you’ll make me beg for it,” Crowley mutters.

“Indeed.”  Aziraphale tilts a sly look from the corner of his eye. “What a clever boy you are.”

“Ngk.”

“And—oof.”  Aziraphale cuts himself short with a grimace.  His left heel is truly beginning to sting.

Crowley tilts his head. “Everything all right, angel?”

“Oh, yes,” Aziraphale says. “Everything is perfectly—perfectly nanty narking.  If you’ll excuse me.”  He waves his empty glass, all beaming innocence.  “I’m going for more refreshments.”

As Aziraphale wanders toward the refreshment table, he watches former nuns move about the hall, darting furtive glances at him from behind their billowing, moth-eaten habits. It would be tiresome if it weren’t so amusing.  Their chattering whispers permeate the air, a fug of curiosity, delight, and envy. 

_Who is that?_

_A friend of Master Crowley?  Another demon?_

_Does he think he’s worthy of Master Crowley’s regard?_

Aziraphale lifts his chin with a smug smile.  If Crowley is going to bring him here and let the nuns think him a demon, he may as well act the role.  He refills his wine glass, turns toward Crowley, and takes a long, languid drink. Across the room, Crowley stands utterly motionless.  His eyes are covered by the customary shades, but Aziraphale can feel the weight of his stare, almost as palpable as a hand. 

Almost, but not quite. And not _nearly_ enough.

“Blast,” he hisses, shifting from foot to foot.  Now his right arch is beginning to burn.  He spares a moment to pity the Crowley of seventy years ago, who sauntered into a church and burned his feet for the sake of a foolish angel.  Crowley burned to spare Aziraphale a heap of paperwork and a stern reprimand, and _oh,_ Aziraphale should be used to the reeling tumult of falling in love with Crowley by now, but he isn’t.  He doubts he will ever be.  

He looks up just in time to see Crowley vanishing through a darkened doorway.   _Come find me._

Aziraphale goes, hooked by a wile he is helpless to thwart.

-

He decides he will keep the suit.

“Do you know,” Crowley mutters against his ear, pushing the suit jacket off before he sets his fingers to the buttons of Aziraphale’s shirt, “what the sight of you in this does to me?  Do you have the faintest fucking _notion—”_

Aziraphale turns his face to kiss him.  As Crowley’s fingers fumble on the buttons, Aziraphale coaxes his mouth open, licks deep inside.  His hands reach out to catch Crowley’s wrists.  “Please, darling,” he says against Crowley’s lips, “your mouth.  I want your mouth—”

Crowley’s fingers are nimbler with his flies, and Aziraphale is almost bereft when he breaks the kiss to sink to his knees.  They have found a little alcove, a recess with punishingly hard brickwork seats jutting out of the curved walls.  A rectangular space on the interior wall is ominously empty, and if either Aziraphale or Crowley had the presence of mind to dwell on it, they might imagine a portrait of the eternally-virginal St. Beryl glaring disapprovingly down at them.

Neither of them has the presence of mind to dwell on it.  The bricks sting at Aziraphale’s back and the tiles feel as if they are slowly chewing away at his feet, but the sinful heat of Crowley’s mouth on his cock chases away the pain.  He rolls his hips, moaning softly as Crowley takes him in deeper.  His fingers thread tightly through Crowley’s hair. “Oh, that’s it, that—that’s perfect, _oh,_ Crowley—”

He braces one foot flat on the floor, intent on getting more leverage, but the spike of pain that shoots up his leg makes him gasp.  Crowley’s hands tighten convulsively on his thighs before he moves away, and Aziraphale very nearly _whimpers_ as his cock slips from his mouth.  Crowley stands, scrutinizing him closely.  “You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine,” Aziraphale says. 

“Nah.  I suspected you were hurting earlier, but now I’m certain of it.  It’s the infernal power of this building, yeah?”

Aziraphale looks at the floor, a little abashed.  “Well.  It’s not comparable with you on consecrated ground, I’ll grant, but…”

Crowley swears under his breath and leans in to rest his brow on Aziraphale’s shoulder.  “You could’ve told me.  We could have just left.”

“And not wait for you to get your award?” Aziraphale asks.  “Absolutely not.  You deserve this, Crowley.  Yes, I can see you getting all soppy, dearest, so if you would kindly get back to the matter at hand…”  An eloquent wave at his cock, still half-hard, “…I would very much appreciate it.”

Crowley chews on his lip, considering.  Then a devilish light sparks in his eyes.  "Or we could improvise."

"What—"  Aziraphale's question breaks off in a yelp as Crowley crowds closer, maneuvers him toward the flat back wall of the alcove.  The suit trousers vanish beneath his fingers, exposing Aziraphale to the stale air.  Before the angel can complain, Crowley twines his arms around him and  _lifts,_ pushing his back flush to the brick.  Each of his hands grips a generous handful of arsecheek, and Aziraphale is spluttering and blushing and locking his legs around the demon's waist before he can think to do otherwise.  

"How's that feel?" Crowley asks, rolling his hips.  The jut of his clothed cock rubs against Aziraphale's, sending jolts of exquisite sensation tripping up his spine.

"Crowley," Aziraphale moans, slinging his arms around his neck, " _ah,_ Crowley, Crowley,  _yes..._ Oh, this won't do..."

"W-What?" Crowley asks, breath ragged.  

"Wanted you to suck me," Aziraphale gasps, "but now I need you inside me.  Can you..."  He waves a shaking hand at Crowley's trousers, scrabbling for a snap of power to miracle them away.   

Crowley chuckles, teeth rasping at his earlobe.  “You know, for an angel, you’re unbelievably wicked.”

“Master Crowley?”

They freeze.  Over Crowley’s shoulder, Aziraphale sees a slight figure emerge from the shadows.  A young woman, twentysomething, probably a novice when the Order was disbanded.  She gapes at them, eyes gone as wide as saucers.

“Master Crowley?” she repeats.  “Did I hear that right?  Is he one of them?  The enemy?”

There are moments, stolen between the rapid-fire heartbeat of fight or flight, where the mind is able to disengage and stretch time.  It is a useful, albeit elusive tool of evolution that allows for compartmentalization, the weighing of options.  In the midst of crises, this ability is lost 99.8% of the time in favor of the mind gibbering uselessly in panic. 

Aziraphale is, by virtue of being very old and very intelligent, in the remaining 0.2%.  And he thinks of a plan.

His hand snatches Crowley around the wrist before he can snap his fingers and wipe the young woman’s mind clean.  He raises his voice to a theatrical cry.  “O, may the Lord have mercy on me!”  Crowley stiffens against him and, praying She isn’t paying attention – or has the Grace to avert Her gaze – Aziraphale continues.  “O fie, I have fallen for a wicked demon’s temptations!”

 _“’Fie?’”_ Crowley hisses.

“Oh!” the young woman gasps, hands flying up to her scarlet cheeks.  “Satan preserve me!  Master Crowley, you’ve—you’re Felling an angel!  Even after all these years, even at your own award ceremony, you’re still so diligently working on behalf of our Dark Lord!  Why, I was just telling Gertrude – she used to be Sister Gerty Gabber, but she always hated that name, she said, _‘now, Novice, it’s Sister Gertrude Gabber to you and don’t you forget it—’”_

“And in front of a young lady, no less!” Aziraphale cries, really getting into it.  Crowley shoots a glare at him but he ignores it, closing his eyes and pressing a hand to his brow.  “That a pure, untainted virgin should witness such carnality!”

The former novice bristles.  “How d’you know I’m a—I mean.  I’m not…”

“What are you on about, Aziraphale?” Crowley whispers.

“Having a bit of fun,” Aziraphale whispers back.  Raising his voice, he adds, “I was once a loyal holy warrior, but now my, er, loins are… steeped in lewd lust for this foul fiend!”

The young woman’s face darkens to crimson and she draws a pentagram over her chest.  “Oh! Dagon be with you, Master Crowley!”

“Shut up,” Crowley begs Aziraphale.  “Please shut up.”

“Give me a hand, dear boy,” Aziraphale whispers, “and I shall.”  He coughs and goes back to his lamentations. “Heaven forgive me!  My holy flesh will be forever corrupted by the boils and lesions of Hell, my soul tarnished—”

“Novice.”  Crowley’s voice is resonant with infernal power, deep enough to scrape the pits of Hell. “Begone!  I would ravish this angel in peace!”

The young woman looks momentarily crestfallen, but a glower from Crowley sends her skittering back down the corridor.  “Anything you say, Master Crowley!”

The door snaps shut behind her, plunging them into silence.  Crowley turns an acidic look on Aziraphale.  “Got it all out of your system, then?”

“I suppose,” Aziraphale sighs.  “That actually was quite fun.”

“I could’ve done without the ‘boils and lesions of Hell,’” Crowley mutters.  “For Someone’s sake, that little ninny will tell the entire Order about this.”

Aziraphale hums, glancing down at his flaccid cock.  “What a pity.”

“Ah.”  Crowley looks abashed.  He lowers Aziraphale to the floor and restores his suit trousers with a wave.  “Sorry about that.  Knew you were… keen.”

“It’s all right, dear boy,” Aziraphale sighs, tucking himself away.  “We can resume this later.  At home, perhaps.  After you’ve tended to my feet.”

“You’re sure?  We could leave now.”

“Don’t you say another word about leaving.  Not until you’ve been given your trophy.”

“I think it’s a plaque.”

Aziraphale sniffs.  “Semantics. Let’s return to the event hall. They’ll be presenting that plaque any minute now.”

“What,” Crowley says, cheeks pink, “go back in there and—but all those nuns—”

Aziraphale grips the lapels of Crowley’s suit jacket and pulls him into a kiss, filthy and deep, chasing the taste of himself.  When they part, he presses his lips to Crowley’s ear.  “The sooner we go out there, the sooner we can go home.  Yes?”

“Ngk,” says Crowley.  “Wooo-eee. Yep.  Yes.”

“Splendid.”

-

Crowley does get his plaque, but that isn’t the end of it.  As he places a proprietary hand on the small of Aziraphale’s back and shepherds him out of the event hall, an entire Order of former nuns regales him with wolf-whistles and high-fives. 


	23. Plagues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a sequel to chapter 14, "Reeds," but you don't necessarily need to read it to understand this one. 
> 
> TW for some disturbing imagery.

The next time Crawly sets foot in the city of Pi Ramesses, he has to fight a marrow-deep instinct to turn around and flee. 

For a single moment, he is transported to a place that is less a place than a _sense:_ of sunlight, warm and golden on his feathers, of love like an embrace that reaches down to his very soul. He is _home,_ and all at once, the sensation of being whole and found and _loved,_ loved in spite of all his shortcomings – it is torn away, and he is reeling, plummeting out of the sky as his wings blacken and burn.  He is Falling again, and a convulsive sob escapes him as his knees turn to water and he staggers to the ground. 

Heavenly wrath.  It infects the very air, a virus swarming through every corner of the city. 

Crawly feels all of this, and his first instinct is to slither as far away as he can get.  But he can’t. Aziraphale’s message is fresh in his mind, the hasty scrawl on papyri a white-hot brand on the backs of his eyelids. He masters the pain, gritting his teeth and casting out his senses.  His power eddies through the mazy streets of Pi Ramesses, through the Egyptian quarter and into the slave ghetto. 

 _There._ A squalid, nondescript hovel of mud and brick, too close to the Nile for comfort. Crawly holds the image in his mind as he wends his way through the city. 

Something is… different, here, eerily so.  When he was last in the slave ghetto, everything was oppressive; it could be no other way, not with the promise of the masters’ whips hanging over their heads.  But even then, there had been a sense of home – of culture and camaraderie, weeds growing in spite of the barren ground.  Now, the very air is freighted with dread. 

When Crawly was last in Pi Ramesses, he was masquerading as Jochebed. He had found the slave woman on the banks of the Nile, bleeding her life into the saturated sand while her children, Miriam and Aaron, looked on in horror.  And beyond them, past the skeletal fingers of the reeds, clutching a sodden basket to his breast as a crocodile raced toward him with its jaws stretched wide—

Crawly banishes the thought with the ease of long practice.  He thinks often of that day – finding Aziraphale with the baby Moses, saving them both from the Nile.  He and the angel had quarreled, after, and Aziraphale fled. Crawly, confronted with three small children and their dead mother, had not. 

He blinks, slowly, and sees the words of Aziraphale’s message glowing white-hot.  _Crawly, you must make haste to Pi Ramesses.  I fear for Moses and his siblings._

As he makes his way through the Egyptian quarter, Crawly opens his mouth and samples the air, expecting the faint traces of apple that have trailed Aziraphale since the Garden.  An onslaught of reeking scents rolls over him, rotting fish and steaming entrails and open sores and _blood, so much blood, a torrent of blood scarring the land._ The force of the stench hits Crawly like a backhand.  He gags, one hand flying up to cover his nose and mouth.  He doesn’t need to breathe, not really, but old habits are hard to break.  Bile creeps up the back of his throat.

 _The Almighty has demanded that Pharaoh release the slaves, then hardened his heart so he would refuse.  I don’t understand.  I don’t—_ A scribble through the next words, the reed pen biting so deep it threatened to tear the papyri.  As if Aziraphale could score through his doubts and be rid of them.

Crawly’s foot slips on something rubbery and stinking of rot.  Grimacing, he peers through the darkness and sees a dead _frog,_ of all things.  Rubbing his heel in the dirt, Crawly casts his gaze across the narrow street.  Tiny amphibian corpses are strewn as far as he can see. 

“What is happening here, Aziraphale?” he asks, softly, and keeps moving. 

He comes to the edge of the Egyptian quarter and passes into the slave ghetto.  As he hurries down the narrow streets, dark slashes catch his eye:  blood, still wet, painted over the doorways of the slaves’ huts. He hesitates, turning this way and that. Every single hut bears the same gruesome marks.  His foot brushes something stiff and light and he leans down to fetch it up.  A hyssop branch, its furled leaves crusted with blood.

No sooner has Crawly picked up the branch than he drops it, throwing his face skyward at a sudden burst of holy energy.  Shrinking, feeling flayed open, Crawly stares in horrified amazement as a white light unfolds from the starless night.  The light coalesces into a human shape, with the suggestions of limbs and a face, but there is nothing remotely human about its immense, innumerable wings, which plume streaks of light as they pass silently through the air.  An angel, but nothing like the angel Crawly knows. This is a being of death, pure and pitiless. 

_I fear for the humans, Crawly.  I don’t know what the Almighty intends._

“Crawly!”

Crawly whips around, startled out of his reverie, and finds Aziraphale pelting toward him.  Before he can react, the angel seizes his hand and plunges into a slender side-street, dragging him bodily along.  Crawly thinks to protest, to fight back, but between Aziraphale and that horrible being unfolding from the night sky—well.  The choice is clear.

They are on the outskirts of the ghetto in moments – close to the Nile, and the reek of blood sets Crawly back on his heels.  Aziraphale pulls him on, through the doorway of the squalid mud-brick hut.  Crawly has the briefest instant to glimpse the blood smeared across the lintel before Aziraphale shoves him inside and slams the door shut behind them.  The wooden bolt slides home with a forceful _clunk._

“Angel,” Crawly hisses, “what—”

“Be silent,” Aziraphale orders.  Such is the steel in his voice that Crawly immediately obeys.  Aziraphale turns to face the closed door, feet planted apart, hands balled into fists at his sides.  As if he’s about to go into battle.  As if he’s about to _fight_ the being on the other side of that door, and all at once, terror grips Crawly. 

In a wash of blinding light that seeps through the door, the being of death lands outside.  Crawly tenses, desperate to bolt, knowing to do so would mean his end.  The light pouring through the cracked wood falls on the floor, dangerously close.  He shrinks back to avoid touching it.  He could almost swear the being of death outside has stopped, considering, before Aziraphale’s door. 

And then the full focus of the light turns away, and it’s as if a sun of heavenly fire has been hidden by clouds.  Crawly sags, boneless, onto the nearby sleeping mat.  His is trembling in every atom of his being.

“You saved my life.”  He sucks in a breath, gut-punched.  “You just saved my life.”

Aziraphale turns to him.  In the burning afterglow of the holy light, his expression is difficult to read.  “Well.  Possibly.”

Crawly bends double, rubbing his temples with scoring fingers.  If that being had crossed him, he wouldn’t have merely been discorporated.  He would have been destroyed, as surely as he would have been destroyed by a bucket of holy water.  The reality of his continued existence has been shaken to the core.

“You should stay here for the night,” Aziraphale says, crossing the tiny room to sit beside him.  “The angel of death will be gone by morning.”

His tone is tight, restrained, and Crawly snaps to his senses.  He looks up.  “Why is an angel of death in Pi Ramesses?”

For a moment, Aziraphale does not respond.  Every line of his being is strung taut, composure suspended on a fraying thread.  Then he covers his face with his hands and begins shaking, quietly but powerfully – great, soundless sobs that wrack his entire body.  Crawly is stunned, and then stunned _again_ when he reaches for the angel, unthinking, and lays gentle hands on his shoulders.  Aziraphale shakes and shakes under his touch.  His face is hidden behind his hands, but Crawly can imagine the agony etched there, the confused hurt that mirrors his own. 

“Tell me,” he murmurs.  “Tell me whatever you like.  I can work out the rest for myself.”

“It’s _terrible,”_ Aziraphale croaks. “Oh, Crawly, I never—Moses was meant to help the Hebrews, that was all, but I don’t… I don’t understand…”  He lowers his hands, and despite the darkness, Crawly notes the tears streaming down his face.  Aziraphale gulps in a breath and forces out the words.  “I don’t understand why She—”

“Don’t,” Crawly says at once.  “Don’t say it.  You can’t say it.”

As soon as he says it, it occurs to him that he should be doing the exact opposite. He should be tempting the angel into doubt, coaxing and cajoling him to Fall.  _Yes, why would She?  Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?  Nothing wrong with that.  Dreadful stuff, really, and She’s up there watching it all play out like it’s just another day in paradise._

All the same, something stops him.  Aziraphale, he realizes, is one of the only angels in all of Heaven that doesn’t deserve to Fall.  He’s one of the good ones.  And Crawly, he’s already Fallen.  It seems such a trifling thing to voice the angel’s doubts, pluck them off his tongue like Eve plucking fruit from the Tree.

“Tell me what She’s doing,” Crawly says, “and no more.”

Aziraphale tells him.  In hushed, hurried words, he tells him, and Crawly’s confusion transforms into horror and rage as he listens.  Rivers of blood.  Frogs, vermin, disease.  And now, this – the firstborn—

“We have to go,” he says.  “If we go to the Egyptian quarter, if we’re quick, we can—”

“Crawly, _no,”_ Aziraphale says, gripping his shoulder to keep him seated.  “If we go out there, the angel of death will destroy you.  Possibly me, too, for interfering.”

Crawly hesitates, fuming.  Children – _innocent children –_ are walking unaware to the chopping block to wound a Pharaoh’s pride.  It sickens him, poisons a well of optimism he had thought long-dry.  But Aziraphale is right; he saw the power of the angel of death.  If Crawly were to cross paths with such a being, he would be blasted to ash in seconds, nothing more than a charred smudge under the angel’s heel as it stalked past. 

He swallows, sick at heart.  “Tell me… Miriam.  And Aaron. Tell me they’re—”

“Safe,” Aziraphale says quickly.  “They’re both safe.  Moses, too, and his wife and children.  They all knew to put the lambs’ blood on their door.”

 _“That’s_ what that was?  Why can’t we…”  Crawly trails off.  He knows why they can’t take the slaughtered lambs to the Egyptians, why they can’t grant immunity to every family in the city.  God doesn’t work like that.  Why bother keeping a plan free of loopholes when you can simply re-knit the universe to suit your whims?  Suture shut the holes?

Crawly sits, helpless, as an angel of death roams the city and rips the life from children as they sleep.  He thinks of his time as Jochebed – of the infant Moses in his arms, heavy and warm, so sweet and perfect.  The day Pharaoh’s guards came to take him away, deliver him to his new home, Crawly wept for the second time in his existence.  The first time had been after the flood. 

 _Funny,_ he thinks, _how it’s always the children who get it worst._

Aziraphale’s hand brushes his, jerking him from the mire of his thoughts. They pull apart and stare at each other in astonishment. 

“I didn’t—”

“Why would you—”

“No, it was a mistake.”

“Er.  Right, then.”

“We’re _hereditary enemies.”_  Aziraphale sounds very nearly panicked. “I couldn’t…”  He falls silent.  His tear-reddened gaze is fixed on the dusty floor.  “We’re meant to be doing the right thing.  That’s how it’s supposed to be.” 

Crawly knows _we_ is meant to mean _Heaven –_ that his presence is a convenient means for the angel to side-step doubt.  Every word wrenches at him, tears at the heart he keeps so closely guarded.  They are echoes of the doubts he harbored so, so long ago.

“I know,” he says simply.  Slowly, cautiously, he lays his hand atop Aziraphale’s.  The angel tenses, and for a moment, Crawly thinks he’s going to tear his hand away.  But he doesn’t, and the touch lingers for a long, quiet moment.  Outside, the scent of burnt lamb wafts into the air. 

They sit side-by-side on the mat, that night, both too wrapped up in their grief to do anything else.  When the first light of dawn touches the mudbrick huts, an awful, soul-deep keening rises up, one thin voice joining another and another and another, a flight of eldritch birds taking wing.  The city is waking.  The Egyptians’ firstborns are not. 

Aziraphale stirs and slips his hand out of Crawly’s.  It is only in the cold loss of touch that Crawly realizes they’ve been holding hands all night. 

“You can leave, now,” Aziraphale says.  “The angel of death is gone.  It should be safe.”

Crawly looks at him for a moment of stupid silence.  Then, nodding, he rises.  “Are you going with them?  The Hebrews?”

“Yes.  I will watch over them in their travels.  I’m… I’m afraid the journey will be long, and hard.” 

“Of course it will be,” Crawly says.  “Hea—Someone forbid it be otherwise.”

“Crawly…”

“Leave it, angel.”  Crawly sets his teeth, chokes on his pride.  “And… thank you.  For saving my life.”

Aziraphale looks up in surprise.  Then, throat bobbing, he says, “Be safe, Crawly.”

Crawly leaves the city of Pi Ramesses.  He never returns.

He hears tales of the Hebrews, later.  Tales of Aaron’s sons burnt to ashes by heavenly fire.  Tales of Miriam’s death in the desert.  Tales of Moses dying on a mountaintop within sight of the Promised Land, never to walk upon it himself.  The grief of it sinks into his bones, impossible to root out, but he tries to take comfort in the fact that Aziraphale was with them.  In that way, at least, their miserable journey had a guiding light. 

He and Aziraphale never speak of that night in Pi Ramesses, but Crawly – and later, Crowley – never forgets the imprint of the angel’s hand in his.   

 


	24. Pigs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crawly runs afoul of the demon Legion and, later, Jesus of Nazareth.

In Crawly’s defense, he hadn’t meant to get mixed up in Legion’s nonsense.

He hadn’t even _wanted_ to be in Gerasa.  He’d been shooting for Pella, intent on meeting Aziraphale for evening drinks at a tavern of some repute, but he’d bungled the miracle and sent himself too far east.  He’s been in Gerasa not five minutes before Legion streaks past, clad in the body of an emaciated human and nothing else.  Stupid with shock, Crawly is helpless against Legion’s pull; it sucks him in, as powerful as gravity, and he is trapped inside the pinwheeling pandemonium of the human’s mind before he can so much as blink.  

Legion is a well-known party animal in the bowels of Hell.  Sometimes, they make for a roaring good time.  Whenever the ruling class of Hell looks away long enough for the lesser demons to drum up a party, Legion is always the first on the dance floor, badly-boogying their little heart out.  

This would all have been tolerable –  _fun,_ even – if that were the end of it.  But Legion is the sort of obnoxious partier that inspires frat boys ‘round the world to get spectacularly shitfaced, ratchet up the decibels of their bellowing with each successive drink, and plague every woman in a fifty-yard radius with atrocious pick-up lines and beer-rank breath. 

They are, in short, an unholy pain in the arse.  And Crawly’s just been forced to share some poor sod’s body with them.  

“Crawly!” they exclaim.  Their voice is a cataclysm of shrieks and squeals and wrenching moans, impossible for the human larynx to replicate.  Crawly winces as pain lances through the man’s throat.  “How you doin’, buddy?”

“Uh, fine,” he replies automatically, because banal pleasantries are the only blessed thing that make sense in the careening carousal of  _flashing light flickering image dank dark gibbering sobs please let me go let me go let me GO—_ “Er.  Just great.”  

“We haven’t seen you since… shit, can’t remember the last time!”

 _Yes,_  Crawly thinks,  _I’d been rather making an effort with that._

“Where are we?” he asks, because the sooner he gets past the basics, the sooner he’ll be able to disentangle himself and escape.   _“Who_  are we?”

“Hell’s teeth, I dunno!” Legion bellows.  

“So why are we—”

“I was bored!  Buddy, am I glad you came along!  We’re gonna have so much fun with this stupid human!”

Crawly, inwardly grimacing, resigns himself to be an unwilling guest in the revelry.  Legion is an idiot with the attention span of a goldfish; the moment they lose interest and cast the wasted husk of this human body aside, he’ll be free.  He only has to wait.  

Three days later, Legion hasn’t lost interest.  And then Jesus of Nazareth wanders into Gerasa.  

“Hello, there,” says Jesus.

Legion may be a fool, but they know the Son of God when they see him. They pull back the man’s lips in a feral snarl.  “Dude, fuck off.  There’s, like, a ton of us.”

Jesus of Nazareth smiles benignly, head cocked, eyebrows arched.  Crawly, crammed inside a body that feels like it’s withering away by the minute, shivers with a soul-deep terror.  

“There certainly are a lot of you,” says Jesus.  “It’s not right, one person being so many.”  

As he speaks, each word uttered with total composure, Crawly becomes aware of the squeals and snorts of pigs nearby.  He clambers up to the human’s eyes, elbowing fragments of Legion aside for a look.  Over the Son of Man’s shoulder, a boy and his father are guiding their herd of swine toward the scene.  

“I think,” Jesus says, quiet menace creeping into his tone, “that you should go back to being separate.  Now.”

The change is dizzying in its suddenness.  Before Crawly can make sense of what has happened, he is looking up at Mary’s baby boy from an entirely different angle, snorting and snuffling and stamping his trotters in the dirt.  He’s been dropped into a bloody  _pig_  like a recalcitrant plant that’s outgrown its pot.  

The squeals around him reach a frantic pitch and Crawly turns, startled.  The other pigs are throwing back their heads with rending screams, eyes rolling, spittle flying from their mouths.  A fragment of Legion has been placed inside each one, and the separation is driving them mad with terror.  They barrel past the boy and his father, heedless of their staffs, and stampede down the rutted dirt road.  It is a narrow road, turning sharply to hug a cliff face overlooking a deep, cold lake. 

Jesus blinks.

A thunderous rumbling sound judders over Legion’s screams and the road buckles, crumbles.  Crawly watches, relief warring with terror, as each pig topples after the other like chain link following chain link to vanish, shrieking and cursing, over the side of the cliff.  The sound of frantic splashing ensues, cut short with preternatural swiftness.  Silence descends.  

Jesus turns to Crawly, who shrinks into himself inasmuch as a two-hundred and fifty-pound hog can shrink.  But the Christ’s smile is no longer menacing; in fact, it’s practically  _pleasant,_ warming Crawly from the tip of his snout to the end of his curly tail.  His every demonic instinct warns him against that warmth – that his will is being leaned on, manipulated – but it’s difficult to focus when he feels suddenly so content.

“Hello, Crowley,” says Jesus.

“That’s not my name,” Crawly replies.  It’s all squealing and snorting, but the Word of Life understands him anyway.  

“My mistake,” Jesus says, in the unbothered, smiling way of someone quite certain they aren’t mistaken.  “Crawly, is it?”

“Maybe,” Crawly mumbles.

“Sorry about that.  The snout, I mean.  Legion had quite the hold on you.”

“Um… it’s fine…?”

“I’ll sort you out right now.”  Her Only Begotten Son rubs his palms together in a way that, some millennia later, will come to mind when Aziraphale embarks on his one-sided love affair with magic tricks.  “Send you off to your friend.”

“My wh—”

Crawly’s vision whites out before he can complete the question.  A moment later, blinking dazedly past the haloes branded on the backs of his eyelids, Crawly finds himself seated at a table, back in his own body.  Aziraphale, siting opposite of him with a jug raised to his lips, stares in wide-eyed amazement.  He lowers the jug.

“Crawly!” he says.  “Why, we were supposed to meet three days ago!  I was worried sick!”

“I’m—”  Crawly pauses, sniffling, and sneezes.  He pointedly ignores the offended expression on Aziraphale’s face as he shields the jug from a drizzle of snot.  Recovering with an accusatory look around the tavern, he continues, “Glad you were able to overcome your crippling worry and c—”  Another sneeze, and this time Aziraphale lifts the jug out of harm’s way.  Crawly soldiers on.  “Carry on  _without me.”_

Aziraphale has the grace to look guilty.  “This is the seasonal menu.  It won’t last much longer.”

“Of course.  How silly of me.”  Crawly points at the jug.  “Give me that.”

“It’s mine,” Aziraphale sniffs.

“Angel.”  Crawly leans across the table, elbows propped on the gnarled wood.  “I’ve been stuck in a human’s body for the last three days with the most annoying demon this side of Creation.  After that, I was trapped inside a sodding  _pig._   Give.  Me.  That.  Drink.”

His speech would be more persuasive without a dribble of snot hanging off the end of his nose, but Crawly glares at the angel nonetheless, determined not to be cowed.  After a moment of staring, perplexed, Aziraphale passes him the jug.  

“You’re leaking,” the angel says petulantly.

“S’fine.”  Crawly takes a determined swig.  “It’ll pass in a minute, don’t you worry.”

-

It doesn’t pass.  In fact, over the next few days, the sneezing gets worse.  With it comes a ridiculous amount of snot, _rivers_ of the stuff, and chills and fevers and stomach upsets that put him entirely off drinking altogether.  By the seventh day, he is bedridden, wheezing and certain he’s about to be discorporated with Someone’s inventive new take on the plague. 

“Oh, stop being so melodramatic,” Aziraphale says, miracling a square of linen to mop the sweat from his brow.  “You’ll be ship-shape in no time.”

“It was the pigs,” Crawly rambles, staring at Aziraphale with glassy eyes.  “I’ve… I’ve got a pig illness.  A pig flu.  A swine flu.”

Aziraphale, cold-hearted nurse that he is, merely scoffs.  “What rubbish.  _‘Swine flu.’”_ He chuckles.  “I’m sure I’ve never heard such nonsense.”

“Bet it’ll be all the funnier when it kills me,” Crawly moans.  _“Then_ you can laugh.”

“Hush.” Aziraphale lays a gentle hand on his brow.  There is no miracle at work – only the cool, steady pressure of his touch.  Somehow, that is enough.  Crawly closes his eyes with a sigh. 


End file.
